With a composing and conducting career of nearly eight decades spanning the turn of the 20 th century, Richard Strauss (1864-1949) was one of most important German composers at the junction of the Romantic and early modern stylistic periods. Strauss’s artistic life stretched from the composer’s earliest compositions in his childhood in the 1870’s until within months of his death in 1949, including some of the most tumultuous periods in European history, and his music weathered numerous shifting musical trends and aesthetics.

Though Strauss wrote songs and chamber music, particularly in his early and late years, his primary strength and identity was as a composer of large-scale works, especially tone poems and opera. The tone poem Don Juan is often regarded as Strauss’s seminal work in the genre, and its success catapulted him to international renown. After a little more than a decade of focus primarily on tone poems—including the famous Also sprach Zarathustra, Till Eulenspiegel and Ein Heldenleben—Strauss became interested in opera. The premieres of his operas Salome and Der Rosenkavalier were greeted with great enthusiasm and further secured his reputation as one of the foremost composers of his generation. Throughout his work in different genres, the New Grove Dictionary keenly observes a common thread: “The earthbound composer wrote music that could soar, especially when catalysed by compelling textual or visual images, for he was a literary or pictorial composer in the sense that he required extra-musical images to charge his imagination or challenge his intellect to creativity.”