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Donald Macleod assesses the enormous demands of Richard Strauss’s appointment to the Berlin Court Opera, with music including the vast canvas of his tone poem Ein Heldenleben.

During Richard Strauss’s lifetime the sound and form of music altered radically. He was born at the tail end of the 19th century and saw the emergence of twelve-tone music and atonality from younger composers like Arnold Schoenberg and his pupil Alban Berg. Strauss belonged to a previous generation and his music came to be regarded as conservative in style, but at the start of his career, Strauss had been seen as something of a modernist, breaking the mould with his series of innovative orchestral tone poems, and with the dissonant sound world of operas such as Salome and Elektra.

This week Donald Macleod follows the young Strauss’s pathway leading up to and including the tone poems, seeing how an immersion in music across his formative years influenced his ideas about orchestral writing, as well as opening up opportunities that helped him to establish a professional career as a conductor.

Strauss conducted some 25 operas a season at Berlin, but these pressures did not diminish the scale and vision of his compositional projects.

Ein Heldenleben, op 40
Ein Held
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Rainer Küchl, violin
George Solti, conductor

Freundliche Vision op 48 no 1
Karita Mattila, soprano
Berlin Philharmonic
Claudio Abbado, conductor

Violin Sonata in E flat op 18
II: Improvisation – Andante cantabile
James Ehnes, violin
Andrew Armstrong, piano

Ein Heldenleben op 40 (excerpt)
Des Helden Walstatt
Des Helden Friedenswerke
Des Helden Weltflucht und Vollendung
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
George Solti, conductor

Der Abend, op 34
Danish National Radio Choir & Chamber Choir
Copenhagen Boys’ Choir
Stefan Parkman, director

Producer: Johannah Smith for Ö÷²¥´óÐã Wales