Composer of the Week: Richard Strauss

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Composer of the Week

Music: Classical

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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): Tempestuous Muse

Tempestuous Muse

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

BBC Radio 3 - Composer of the Week, Richard Strauss (1864-1949), Tempestuous Muse

Donald Macleod explores key figures in Strauss’s life. Today, his wife, Pauline de Ahna.

Donald Macleod explores key figures in Strauss’s life. Today, his 'domineering and difficult, yet devoted' wife, soprano Pauline de Ahna. Their marriage lasted nearly 55 years.

All this week, Donald Macleod explores key figures in the life of Richard Strauss. Today we’re spending some quality time with his “domineering and difficult, yet devoted” wife, the soprano Pauline de Ahna. Strauss died two days short of what would have been their 55th wedding anniversary, in September 1949. Pauline followed him less than a year later.

Commenting on ‘The Hero’s Companion’ – the third movement of his avowedly autobiographical tone poem Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life) – Strauss told his friend the writer Romain Rolland, “It’s my wife I wanted to show. She is very complicated, très femme, a little perverse, a bit of a coquette, never the same twice, different each minute from what she was a minute earlier.” Nonetheless, Strauss seems to have been contented enough: “my wife is often a little harsh,” he once said, “but, you know, I need that.” Pauline was the daughter of a General, which may account for her no-punches-pulled approach to the world – her husband included. In one version of an oft-told story, she threw her score at Strauss during a rehearsal of his first opera Guntram, in which she was singing the female lead, and stormed off stage. Strauss pursued her, followed hot-foot by the leader of the orchestra. A few minutes later, the maestro emerged from his diva’s dressing room to announce their engagement to the astonished gentleman. A quarter of a century later, the soprano Lotte Lehmann visited the Strauss’s at their home in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. “I often caught a glance or a smile passing between Pauline and her husband,”, she recalled, “touching in its love and happiness, and I began to sense something of a profound affection between these two human beings, a tie so elemental in strength that none of Pauline’s shrewish truculence could ever trouble it seriously.” Strauss said that no one else sang his songs in as beautiful and touching a way as Pauline did, and certainly her voice was the inspiration behind two of the lieder that bookend their marriage, and this programme: ‘Morgen’ (Tomorrow) and ‘Im Abendrot’ (At Sunset) – the former a wedding gift, full of hope; the latter a shared reflection on mortality, as an elderly couple, “weary of wandering”, gaze hand in hand upon the setting sun.


Guntram, Op 25 (Act 2, Overture)
Hungarian State Orchestra
Eve Queler, conductor

Morgen (Tomorrow), Op 27 No 4
Soile Isokoski, soprano
Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra
Marek Janowski, conductor

Ein Heldenleben, Op 40 (No 3, Das Helden Gefährtin)
Berlin Philharmonic
Michel Schwalbé, solo violin
Herbert von Karajan, conductor

Intermezzo, Op 72  (Act I, Sc 1 “Anna, Anna! Wo bleibt denn nur die dumme Gans?”)
Lucia Popp, soprano (The Wife)
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, baritone (The Husband)
Gabriele Fuchs, soprano (Anna)
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra
Wolfgang Sawallisch, conductor

Symphonia Domestica, Op 53 (2b, Wiegenlied; 3, Adagio)
SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg
François-Xavier Roth, conductor

Four Last Songs, Op posth (No 4, Im Abendrot)
Soile Isokoski, soprano
Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra
Marek Janowski, 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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