Composer of the Week: Richard Strauss

Original version

BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

BBC Radio 3

Radio 3

Migrated podcast image for: Composer Of The Week

Composer of the Week

Music: Classical

Composer of the Week - Brand

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): Best Frenemies

Best Frenemies

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

BBC Radio 3 - Composer of the Week, Richard Strauss (1864-1949), Best Frenemies

Donald Macleod explores key figures in Strauss’s life. Today, Gustav Mahler.

Donald Macleod explores key figures in Strauss’s life. Today, Gustav Mahler, with whom Strauss enjoyed a friendly rivalry – spiked, on Mahler’s side, with a dash of resentment.

All this week, Donald Macleod explores key figures in the life of Richard Strauss. Today he’s joined by that other Titan of Austro-German music at the turn of the 20th century, the composer Gustav Mahler, with whom Strauss enjoyed a friendly rivalry – spiked, perhaps, on Mahler’s side at least, with a dash of resentment.

We get a sense of this resentment from the published recollections of Mahler’s wife Alma. She’s an at times biased and unreliable witness, but her account of Strauss’s behaviour following the first complete performance – at Strauss’s instigation – of Mahler’s Nietzsche-inspired 3rd Symphony does seem to have the ring of truth about it. She recalled that after the concert, she and Mahler had supper at a small inn: “Strauss, as he passed our table, gave us all his hand in a lordly way and went on, without noticing Mahler’s extreme agitation or addressing a single word to him. Mahler took this very much to heart. His spirits sank, and the public acclamation now seemed of no account.” It’s also from Alma that we know about the occasion on which Strauss performed his recently completed opera Salome for them, in a piano shop in Strasbourg, where they had travelled for a music festival. Mahler, who had originally advised Strauss against setting Oscar Wilde’s play to music, was completely blown away by it, and his subsequent failure to get the scandalous new work past the Austrian censors was one of the main reasons he eventually resigned his Directorship of the Vienna State Opera and crossed the Atlantic to pursue his career in New York. Mahler’s death just a few years later seems to have rekindled for Strauss the flame of an old project – also inspired by the philosophy of Nietzsche. Originally to be called Sunrise, it briefly became The Antichrist, before finally acquiring the name by which we know it today: An Alpine Symphony, reflecting Strauss’s love of the spectacular mountain scenery that surrounded him at his home in the Bavarian Alps. Mahler, too, wrested musical inspiration from the mountains. When the conductor Bruno Walter came to visit him at his composing retreat in Steinbach am Attersee during the composition of his 3rd Symphony, the composer said to him: “Don't bother looking at the mountains, I have already composed them into my symphony.”


Salome, Op 54 (“Wie schön ist die Prinzessin Salome heute nacht!”)
Wiesław Ochman, tenor (Narraboth)
Heljä Angervo, contralto (Page)
Gerd Nienstedt, bass (First Soldier)
Kurt Rydl, bass (Second Soldier)
Vienna Philharmonic
Herbert von Karajan, conductor

Symphony No 2 in F minor, Op 12 (2nd mvt, Scherzo)
Frankfurter Opern- und Museumorchester
Sebastian Weigle, conductor

Also sprach Zarathustra, Op 30 (8, The Dance Song; 9. Song of the Night Wanderer)
City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra
Andris Nelsons, conductor

An Alpine Symphony, Op 64 (13, On the Summit; 14, Vision; 15, Mists Rise)
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra
Mariss Jansons, conductor

Salome, Op 54 (Sc 4, “Ah! Du wolltest mich deinen Mund nicht küssen lassen, Jochanaan!”)
Hildegard Behrens, soprano (Salome)
Karl-Walter Böhm, tenor (Herod)
Agnes Baltsa, mezzo-soprano (Herodias)
Vienna Philharmonic
Herbert von Karajan, conductor


Produced by Chris Barstow for BBC Audio Wales & West

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

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

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

Accessibility links

Programme Index

Composer of the Week

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

Best Frenemies

Genres

Brand

Series

BBC Radio 3

About BBC Radio 3