From his early experiences as a conductor to the final performances of his operas, Richard Strauss collaborated with the most accomplished artists in the German-speaking theater. These associations set standards for productions of his stage works which were essential for their short- and long-term success. Important collaborators included the directors Max Reinhardt and Rudolf Hartmann, choreographers Heinrich Kröller and the duo of Pino and Pia Mlakar, and designers Alfred Roller and Ludwig Sievert. These and other partnerships flourished in the cities which Strauss favored for his premieres: Dresden, Munich, and Vienna. Under the auspices of the Salzburg Festival, Strauss and his stage collaborators established a vital legacy of production that continues into the present.

Strauss’s early life was dominated by his father, Franz, the leading horn player of his day, who rose from poverty to marry a rich heiress, Josepha Pschorr. Franz oversaw his son’s music education, keeping any modern tendencies firmly in check, while Josepha’s family helped to finance Richard’s early publications. Richard’s youthful works show little individuality, but great facility and a systematic approach, as if he were absorbing the repertoire of his Austro-German predecessors in chronological fashion, starting with Haydn and reaching Brahms by the age of twenty. Richard benefitted from the tuition of his father’s musician colleagues and from the excellent local education system, which instilled in him a love of the classics (both Greek and German). Family life was complicated, however, by his father’s violent temper and his mother’s mental illness: from 1885 onwards, she spent her life in and out of clinics.

As we look back on Strauss’s long and prodigious career, it might all seem to be the inevitable product of superlative technique and talent – so much so that we might overlook the people who contributed to Strauss’s career and legacy from his days as a child prodigy to the recording studio decades after his death. This chapter takes stock of a wide range of figures who helped to set Strauss along his professional path, including aunts, uncles, and other extended family, his father Franz, the conductors Hans von Bülow, Franz Wüllner, Ernst von Schuch, Gustav Mahler, Franz Schalk, Hans Knappertsbusch, Karl Böhm, and Clemens Krauss, and singers Maria Jeritza, Lotte Lehman, Richard Mayr, Anna Bahr-Mildenburg, Marie Gutheil-Schoder, and Elisabeth Schumann. In various ways, some direct and others indirect, these champions contributed to the success and legacy of one of Germany’s most enduring composers.

Hofmannsthal’s death in 1929 left Strauss in a quandary. The will to compose was undiminished, and a replacement of similar caliber was difficult to find. Over the ensuing twenty years, Strauss enlisted the services of three further librettists. First was the celebrated Jewish writer Stefan Zweig, who supplied the text for Die schweigsame Frau. After Zweig exiled himself from his Austria in 1936, the distraught composer turned to the Viennese theater historian Joseph Gregor as collaborator on Friedenstag, Daphne, and Die Liebe der Danae. Last was Clemens Krauss, whom Strauss entrusted with the libretto of Capriccio, Strauss’s last opera. Decades earlier, Strauss himself wrote the text for his first music drama, Guntram, but it was “song-and-dance-man” Ernst von Wolzogen (Feuersnot) whose racy libretto served to loosen the Wagnerian chains that bound the composer in Guntram and pointed Strauss in a direction that led the Hofmannsthalian masterpieces of the next three decades.

This chapter deals with Munich and Garmisch (today Garmisch-Partenkirchen), two central places in the life of Richard Strauss. It focuses not only on the phases during which he lived and worked there, but also the significance of both cities in terms of Strauss today. Munich and Garmisch changed considerably over Strauss's lifetime, which spanned from the reign of Ludwig II and influence of Richard Wagner in Munich to the destruction of World War II and the early post-war period, offers a complex, changeful picture. The chapter focuses on the interpenetration of cultural, social, political, and artistic structures and Strauss's interaction with their representatives. By locating the composer and conductor in different milieus, life and work are to become graspable as part of multi-layered contexts that are characterized by interdependencies as well as tensions and contradictions.

This chapter surveys the wide range of spiritual and philosophical ideas that influenced Strauss during the emergence of his famously idiosyncratic worldview. Already a “freethinker” in his youth, and a product of an “alt-katholisch” household that rejected central Catholic doctrine, Strauss settled into a comfortable atheism while still in his teens. This skeptical disposition provided the backdrop for his encounters with 1) the fundamentalist Wagnerian metaphysics of his mentor, Alexander Ritter, and Wagner’s powerful and cultured widow Cosima; 2) Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1818, 1844), which he studied carefully on his own; 3) the later, anti-Wagnerian writings of Nietzsche (most famously Also sprach Zarathustra), which had a powerful effect on Strauss’s tone poems beginning with Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche (1895); and 4) the artistic and intellectual legacy of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, his lodestar, whose devotion to classical culture, and break from Romanticism, were paralleled by Strauss’s own.

Stanley Kubrick’s choice to appropriate the opening gesture of Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra (1896) in his science fiction masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) provided this music with a degree of pop-culture notoriety rarely attained by "serious" works. Afforded the mass exposure of a Hollywood blockbuster, the tone poem’s visceral power manifested itself in settings the composer never could have imagined: athletic stadiums, discotheques, Elvis Presley concerts, and cell phones, saturating the popular consciousness to an extent perhaps unparalleled. Beneath this spectacular feat of publicity, however, the film offers a rich and sophisticated reading of Strauss’s music, by duplicating visually the music’s dazzling aural effects, by engaging with the same Nietzschean dilemmas that occupied Strauss (particularly humanity’s evolving struggle to conceptualize the fate of the individual), and by seeking to integrate the worlds of self-consciously significant artistic expression and commercial entertainment.

Richard Strauss’s contacts with Vienna spanned more than six decades, from the time of his brief stint as a university student in 1882 through the Allied air campaigns of 1944. This chapter focuses on the city of Vienna during the period of Strauss’s tenure as codirector of the State Opera from 1919–24, years defined by the founding of the First Austrian Republic and policies instituted by the Municipal Council in response to ongoing economic turmoil. While the situation was less dire than in Berlin, Vienna was nonetheless a city in crisis when Strauss arrived in early December 1919. Examination of “Red Vienna,” named for initiatives of the ruling Social Democratic Party, serves as context for the cultural life in which he participated as a well-respected and well-paid musical celebrity. Attention then shifts to Strauss’s life and work in Vienna with an emphasis on the institutions and figures comprising his private and professional orbit.

The European "modernism" of which Strauss was considered a representative in the 1890s and the "avant-garde" modernism that would exclude him in the new century differed significantly. Both are defined here as manifestations of, or critical reactions to, cultural and technological modernity. Varying shades of modernism are illustrated with reference to critical responses to Strauss and to his own 1907 essay "Is there an Avant-Garde in Music?" The length of Strauss’s career and the stylistic choices he made both reflect and problematize the once common notion that the history of the period’s music was simply one of evolutionary progress, which he first exemplified and then rejected. The varied and changing context of Strauss’s critical stance and compositional output resides not only in artistic ideas but also in politics and social practice in institutions like opera houses and concert halls and their audiences.

Richard Strauss's late operatic and instrumental works exemplify a positive meaning of lateness in the context of creative production: not to be "late" in an artistic or stylistic sense, but rather a fulfillment and purification of both compositional technique and content. Discussing Strauss's lateness in the larger context of the musical and philosophical debate (considering the positions of Gottfried Benn, Theodor Adorno, and Edward Said, as well as Auguste Rodin's ideas on antiquity), the author offers a new perspective in joining that intense period of the composer with James Hillman's consideration of aging as the culmination of a creative life. Thus, Strauss's last period exemplifies what the American psychologist calls the "force of character."

Three figures stand out as formative influences on the young Richard Strauss: his father, Franz, a hornist of conservative tastes; Hans von Bülow, a former Liszt pupil and recovering Wagnerian who was frequently at loggerheads with Franz; and Alexander von Ritter, another Liszt student who retained his passion for the music of the future when Bülow abjured it. From his father Strauss acquired a deep and abiding love of the music of classical and early romantic eras. From Bülow, to whom he was an assistant for a few months in 1885, he learned much about the art and craft of conducting. From Ritter, Strauss received a passionate induction into the progressive ideas of Liszt, Wagner, and Schopenhauer, which led to the composition of his early tone poems and his first opera, Guntram. Even though Strauss would eventually distance himself creatively from their advice, each contributed significantly to his artistic development.

This chapter brings Strauss’s music into constructive dialogue with Hollywood film, via the persona of Erich Korngold. It examines Korngold’s historical connection with Strauss through the former composer’s operas and concert works, before exploring the ways in which Strauss can be heard in the film scores by Korngold and his contemporaries in the 1930s and 40s. The use of one particular Straussian harmonic trait – third-related triadic sequences (of both octatonic and hexatonic variety) – is highlighted in Korngold’s scores and traced in more recent film, including in the output of John Williams. Williams’s use of what Frank Lehman calls "chromatically modulating cadential resolutions" can also be found in Strauss and Korngold. The chapter concludes by suggesting that hearing Strauss in Korngold and Williams is just one way of constructing a Straussian Text, one that reveals the power of seeking to encounter Strauss’s music in varied and surprising contexts.

During the first decade of the twentieth century, Strauss served at the helm of the oldest and most successful German society dedicated to the performance of new music, the General German Music Society (Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein). The chapter examines Strauss’s contribution to the organization’s revival at a time of decline for the ADMV, as he gazed back at founder Liszt’s legacy and looked to the future through his own music and the work of Mahler, among others. His activity is positioned within the context of affiliated composers and dominant issues throughout the ADMV’s seventy-five-year history, from its establishment by Liszt and Franz Brendel through its dissolution under the Third Reich. This essay lays bare the society’s struggles over German identity, musical modernism, and reactionary politics while recognizing its role in promoting the careers of such important figures as Mahler, Reger, and Schoenberg.

Composers have long engaged with texts, but the extent to which they have consciously constructed a literary cosmos around their work and private lives has radically changed over the last two centuries. For modern composers, it has been increasingly common to read not merely to enrich intellectual horizons or scour for musically settable material, but as a means to tap into a reservoir through which the reception of their music can add a layer of cultural legitimation. Viewed against this wider context, the extensive library that Strauss collected, read, and selectively presented to audiences in various musical formats symbolizes neither the physical legacy of a lifelong bibliophile (Brahms) nor the quiet spiritual refuge of a well-heeled bourgeois (Elgar). Rather, it constitutes the material footprint of an intellectual disposition toward the world that stems from a deeper-held set of beliefs about the cultural mission of literature in Western European history.

Political, social, technical, and cultural changes formed the context when Strauss composed a large part of his Lieder oeuvre between 1887 and 1906. The Liederabend had been established as a new concert format in the 1870s, shifting the genre’s performance environment from the private salon to the public stage, a development not without consequences for the genre itself. Strauss developed a personal style that clearly distinguished him from contemporaries such as Hugo Wolf, Gustav Mahler, or Max Reger. Seemingly untouched by the changes of his time at first glance, Strauss nevertheless reflected current affairs in some of his Lieder. This is true in particular for the year 1918, the last year of World War I, when Strauss took up composing Lieder after a twelve-year hiatus. When the aged composer later reflected upon his role in his construction of musical and cultural history, the Lied played a significant part within this process of self-affirmation.

A survey of dissertations on Strauss reveals trends that emerged over time in terms of topics and methodologies that captured the interest of emerging scholars as well as the geographic locations and eras that produced the most research. Yet Strauss scholarship is not merely defined by the issues it addresses and questions it puts forward, but also by those it ignores or unwittingly pushes to the margins of discussion. After assessing the past, this chapter proposes topics and approaches largely absent in existing Strauss scholarship, many of which have been more thoroughly explored in related fields. While far from comprehensive, this discussion points to potentially fruitful paths for future research: the Lieder, his influence on contemporaries, his role as Kapellmeister and administrator, his material possessions, and his relationships with figures trusted to construct his legacy.