Composer of the Week: Richard Strauss

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Composer of the Week

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An informative guide to composers' lives and their music.

An informative and accessible guide to composers' lives and their music.

Composer of the Week: Richard Strauss (1864-1949): The Odd Couple

The Odd Couple

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

BBC Radio 3 - Composer of the Week, Richard Strauss (1864-1949), The Odd Couple

Donald Macleod explores key figures in Strauss’s life. Today, Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

Donald Macleod explores key figures in Strauss’s life, today, his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. These two very different men enjoyed an extraordinarily productive partnership.

All this week, Donald Macleod explores key figures in the life of Richard Strauss. Today we meet his first and most distinguished librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal. These two very different men – practically chalk and cheese – enjoyed an extraordinarily productive creative partnership that lasted over two decades and was only terminated by Hofmannsthal’s untimely death in 1929.

Their paths had first crossed in 1900, but the idea of a collaboration didn’t emerge till a few years later, when Strauss saw a production of Hofmannsthal’s German-language adaptation of Sophocles’ bleak revenge-tragedy Elektra at Berlin’s Little Theatre. Strauss immediately saw that the play was crying out to be transformed into an opera; Hofmannsthal was happy to concur; and a masterpiece was born – one that consolidated Strauss’s position – recently established by his succès de scandale, Salome – as one of the leading lights of the musical avant-garde. Their next collaboration turned things topsy-turvy, as Strauss beat a nifty retreat from the brink of the stylistic precipice on which he had found himself teetering with Elektra, and plunged headlong into the warm bath of Der Rosenkavalier, a comedy of manners set in 18th-century Vienna during the reign of Maria Theresa. Four more operas followed, the last of which – a straightforward love-story, Arabella – was Hofmannsthal’s response to Strauss’s request for “a second Rosenkavalier – if you can’t think of anything better”. When the première finally took place, in Dresden in July 1933, Hofmannsthal had been dead for four years. In a manner worthy of tragic opera, he had died of a stroke as he dressed for the funeral of his elder son Franz, who had killed himself two days earlier. Strauss was disconsolate, saying of his former partner, “No one will ever replace him for me or for the world of music.” As for Arabella, the première was only a moderate success, and when it was produced in Vienna, several wits dubbed it Sklerosenkavalier – Strauss being diagnosed as suffering from sclerosis of his musical arteries. Notwithstanding the sharp tongues of those catty Viennese critics, the opera has stayed in the repertoire internationally to this day.


Der Rosenkavalier, Op 59 (Act 1, Introduction)
Philharmonia Orchestra
Herbert von Karajan, conductor

Le bourgeois gentilhomme, suite for orchestra, Op 60 (1. Overture)
The Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen
Paavo Järvi, conductor

Elektra, Op 58 (Scene 6, ‘Was willst du, fremder Mensch?’)
Inge Borkh, soprano (Elektra)
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, baritone (Orestes)
Staatskapelle Dresden
Karl Böhm, conductor

Arabella, Op 79 (Act 2, love duet “Sie sehn nicht aus wie jemand, den das alles da interessiert.”)
Lisa della Casa, soprano (Arabella)
George London, baritone (Mandryka)
Waldemar Kmentt, tenor (Elemer)
Harald Pröglhoff, bass (Lamoral)
Vienna Philharmonic
Georg Solti, conductor

Der Rosenkavalier, Op 59  (Act 3, Finale)
Philharmonia Orchestra
Herbert von Karajan, conductor


Produced by Chris Barstow for BBC Audio Wales & West

Composer of the Week: Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

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Donald Macleod explores key figures in the life of Richard Strauss.

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