Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. Hardcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> This is a scholarly but very readable account of the carly years of one of the great late Romantic German composers Richard Strauss. What distinguishes it from other biographical accounts is that Willi Schuh was commissioned to write the official biography by Strauss himself and has had access to a wealth of documentation in the Strauss Archive at Garmisch. It is therefore a definitive biography of the first thirty-four years of Strauss’s life. The son of the first-horn-player in the Munich Court Orchestra Strauss was brought up in an intensely musical environment. He was to produce while still a boy a flood of compositions: songs piano music chamber music. His father loathed the music of Wagner but Strauss was to become an aggressive advocate of the modern school of composers; he rejected Brahms and championed the innovations brought about by Berlioz Wagner and Liszt. Song-writing was to remain a favourite form of musical expression but as he grew to maturity he was to turn again and again to the orchestral tone poem as a means of expressing his bold sometimes extravagant musical ideas. It was during the eighties and nineties that Strauss produced a whole sequence of such works including Don Juan Macbeth Tod und Verkl?rung Till Eulenspiegel Also sprach Zarathustra Don Quixote and Ein Heldenleben. Willi Schuh reminds us however that to begin with Strauss was better known to a wider public as a conductor rather than as a composer. He charts Strauss’s conducting career from his succession to von B?low at the court of Meiningen to important posts in Munich Weimar and Bayreuth. The book ends with Strauss’s departure for Berlin in 1898 to succeed Weingartner as conductor of the Court Opera by which time he had completed the first of many operas: the ultimately unsuccessful Guntram. Willi Schuh has much to say not only about Strauss’s development but about the musical life in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century as well. He has written a documentary biography which is equally valuable as a reference-book since it incorporates a bibliography a chronology a comprehensive list of works including discarded compositions and unfinished pieces details of first performances along with press criticisms and the continued on back flap. (MP)