Richard Strauss came from a musical family - his father, Franz, was the principal French Horn player in the Royal Opera Orchestra in Munich. He began music lessons when he was very young, and when he began composing, his father tried to influence him into writing more conservative music. Strauss, however, loved the music of Richard Wagner, and was inspired to try to write modern programmatic music based on Wagner’s example.

 

Much of Strauss’ music is written as “Symphonic Poems”: a one movement form, invented much earlier by Franz Liszt, which tries tell a story or describe a picture through music.

 

Like Dmitri Shostakovich and Giuseppe Verdi, Strauss lived during very difficult political times. In 1933, against his will, he was made an officer in the Nazi party, which controlled Germany at the time. His opera Friedenstag was an attempt to criticize the Nazis in such a way that they would not realize what he was doing.

 

These days, Strauss’ most famous work is probably Also Sprach Zarathustra (“Thus Spoke Zoroaster”) which found a large audience when it was used in the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.