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Richard Georg Strauss (11 June 1864 – 8 September 1949) was a leading German composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras. He is known for his operas, which include ''Der Rosenkavalier'', ''Elektra'', ''Die Frau ohne Schatten'' and ''Salome''; his Lieder, especially his ''Four Last Songs''; his tone poems, including ''Don Juan'', ''Death and Transfiguration'', ''Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks'', ''Also sprach Zarathustra'', ''Ein Heldenleben'', ''Symphonia Domestica'', and ''An Alpine Symphony''; and other instrumental works such as ''Metamorphosen'' and his Oboe Concerto. Strauss was also a prominent conductor throughout Germany and Austria. Strauss, along with Gustav Mahler, represents the late flowering of German Romanticism after Richard Wagner, in which pioneering subtleties of orchestration are combined with an advanced harmonic style. ==Early life and family== Strauss was born on 11 June 1864 in Munich, the son of Josephine (née Pschorr) and Franz Strauss, who was the principal horn player at the Court Opera in Munich.〔http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Richard_Strauss.aspx〕 In his youth, he received a thorough musical education from his father. He wrote his first composition at the age of six and continued to write music almost until his death. During his boyhood Strauss attended orchestra rehearsals of the Munich Court Orchestra (now the Bavarian State Orchestra), and he also received private instruction in music theory and orchestration from an assistant conductor there. In 1872 he started receiving violin instruction at the Royal School of Music from Benno Walter, his father's cousin. In 1874 Strauss heard his first Wagner operas, ''Lohengrin'' and ''Tannhäuser''. The influence of Wagner's music on Strauss's style was to be profound, but at first his musically conservative father forbade him to study it. Indeed, in the Strauss household, the music of Richard Wagner was viewed with deep suspicion, and it was not until the age of 16 that Strauss was able to obtain a score of ''Tristan und Isolde''. In later life, Strauss said that he deeply regretted the conservative hostility to Wagner's progressive works.〔Boyden 1999, p. 〕 Nevertheless, Strauss's father undoubtedly had a crucial influence on his son's developing taste, not least in Strauss's abiding love for the horn. In early 1882 in Vienna he gave the first performance of his Violin Concerto in D minor, playing a piano reduction of the orchestral part himself, with his teacher Benno Walter as soloist. The same year he entered Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he studied philosophy and art history, but not music. He left a year later to go to Berlin, where he studied briefly before securing a post as assistant conductor to Hans von Bülow, who had been enormously impressed by the young composer's Serenade for wind instruments, composed when he was only 16 years of age. Strauss learned the art of conducting by observing Bülow in rehearsal. Bülow was very fond of the young man and decided that Strauss should be his successor as conductor of the Meiningen Court Orchestra when Bülow resigned in 1885. Strauss's compositions at this time were indebted to the style of Robert Schumann or Felix Mendelssohn, true to his father's teachings. His Horn Concerto No. 1, Op. 11, is representative of this period and is a staple of modern horn repertoire. Strauss married soprano Pauline de Ahna on 10 September 1894. She was famous for being irascible, garrulous, eccentric and outspoken, but the marriage, to all appearances, was essentially happy and she was a great source of inspiration to him. Throughout his life, from his earliest songs to the final ''Four Last Songs'' of 1948, he preferred the soprano voice to all others, and all his operas contain important soprano roles. The Strausses had one son, Franz, in 1897. Franz married Alice von Grab, a Jewish woman, in a Roman Catholic ceremony in 1924. Franz and Alice had two sons, Richard and Christian. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Richard Strauss」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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