Richard Strauss: A Musical Genius

Strauss, Richard: Til Eulenspiegel Born on June 11, 1864, Richard Strauss was the first born child to the musician Franz Joseph Strauss. Richard was born in Munich, the capital of a German state called Bavaria. Due to Richard being raised on Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, by the age of six he had started composing his own pieces. These pieces included “Schneider-polka” and “Weihnachtslied”.
While he could only write musical notes to these, his mother wrote the lyrics because of his young age. Once he hit the age of 18, he had managed to produce about 140 pieces. These pieces were composed of multiple types. Sixty of them were Lieder, which is Romantic German poems set to music, and about forty of them were classical piano works. In 1881, Strauss’ …show more content…
About a year later, he started as one of the three musical directors at the Munich Court Opera, after leaving Meiningen. After traveling to Italy, he acquired inspiration, and created his first symphonic poems, “Out of Italy”, and “Macbeth”. This introduced a four movement structure. After the success of that symphonic poetry, he went on to produce eight more single movement compositions. After his piece “An Alpine Symphony”, he reached the climax of his music of instrumentation. Strauss married his wife, Pauline after he was appointed music director of Weimer. After the death of his friend van Bülow, Strauss took over the concerts of the Berlin Philharmonic. In 1897, his son was born and not long after that he strayed away from his main success pieces of tone poems. He became internationally renowned. Even though Strauss was a very successful composer, he did not get the position of Munich General Music Director. Out of spite of this rejection, he moved to Berlin and composed a piece based on his life called “Sinfonica Domestica”. In 1904, he premiered this piece in New York City. After coming back from New York, Strauss fell in awe of Oscar