Richard Strauss

Set on the path of the tone poem by Ritter's persuasion, he premiered this work in Weimar at twenty-five, and it made his name at a stroke. Following the poet Lenau, it portrays a man who endlessly pursues the ideal woman until he sinks, exhausted.

• At the opening, the strings surge in a single leap from low to high (ascending), announcing the arrival of an energetic hero. So hard to play fast and precisely together, the passage is notorious as a staple of orchestral violin auditions.
• Listen for the long, slow melody the oboe sings in the love scene midway through. It is regarded as the deepest, most tranquil moment of love in the whole piece.
• Then a proud theme bursts out from four horns singing as one voice (unison). It is the most famous of Strauss's horn melodies, and the instrument of his father, a horn player, becomes the hero's voice.
• At the end, the orchestra halts abruptly at the climax (general pause), a shrill trumpet dissonance pierces through, and the strings tremble thinly and fade away. This corresponds to the scene in Lenau's poem where Don Juan lays down his own sword in a duel and dies.

The last song of the collection he gave Pauline as a wedding gift on their marriage. Like John Henry Mackay's poem, in which the sun will shine again tomorrow, it pictures a quiet future shared with a beloved.

• Before the singing begins, the piano plays the melody almost to its end, and the voice slips in quietly while the melody is still flowing. The song feels less like the protagonist than like something joining a time already in motion.
• The singer sings very slowly and without force, almost speaking. With no dramatic high notes, it is counted among singers as a song that must be sustained by breath control and tone color alone.
• On the final word, ‘silence,’ the voice sinks low, and the piano's closing passage (postlude) lets the resonance linger long.
• In the orchestral version he made himself in 1897, a solo violin takes the opening melody in place of the piano. Comparing it with the piano version reveals how differently the same song can shine.

Written after he returned to his native Munich following the failure of Guntram, it portrays the folk prankster who mocks authority until he finally mounts the gallows. Free of weighty philosophy, it shows his humor and wit at their best.

• At the opening the strings gently begin the tale as if saying ‘once upon a time,’ and then the horn blows Till's theme, its rhythm twisted so that it tumbles along as if stumbling. The passage is famous as a staple of horn auditions.
• The short figure shrieked out by the small, high D clarinet sounds like Till's laughter as he makes fun of people.
• In the middle come scenes of Till riding through the marketplace smashing pots, disguising himself as a priest, and ridiculing scholars. The composer's own notes list the scenes, so you can guess at each escapade as you listen.
• In the trial scene, after a snare-drum roll and heavy brass chords of judgment, the clarinet depicts the hanging with a figure that drops sharply from a high note. Then the opening ‘once upon a time’ returns to close the tale.

A tone poem that borrows the title of Nietzsche's book from the years when Strauss was reading him avidly. Rather than putting philosophy into music, he explained, he had traced humanity's path from its primitive origins, through religion and science, to the free spirit.

• In the introduction, ‘Sunrise,’ the organ and double basses lay down a long, very low ‘C,’ above which the trumpets rise through the three notes ‘C-G-C,’ answered by thudding timpani. Used in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), it became the most famous opening in the world.
• In ‘Of Science and Learning’ the double basses and cellos lay out the theme low and dark, and a fugue begins as the other instruments take it up one after another. The theme uses all twelve notes within a single octave, and it is usually read as a symbol of dry, intricate learning.
• In ‘The Dance Song’ a solo violin steps forward to lead a buoyant waltz. Feel the lightness that arrives after heavy contemplation.
• At the very end, a bright B chord in the high woodwinds alternates with a C in the low strings, and the piece closes with the two still unreconciled. It is widely heard as a conflict between humanity and nature that is never resolved.

A one-act opera from the Berlin years that takes Oscar Wilde's play almost unchanged as its libretto, bringing scandal and box-office success alike. That success let him build his house in Garmisch and secured his finances for the rest of his life.

• ‘The Dance of the Seven Veils’ is an orchestral dance that begins slowly with an Eastern-flavored melody and grows steadily faster and fiercer. It is often performed on its own in concert, outside the opera.
• At the moment Jochanaan is executed in the underground cistern, the double basses make an eerie sound, pinching a high note tightly between the fingers and scraping it briefly with the bow. It is an effect the composer specified in the score himself, and it sounds like a stifled groan.
• In the final scene, as Salome kisses the severed head, an ear-piercing dissonance rings out. It is spoken of as one of the most shocking chords in the history of opera.
• Strauss is said to have remarked that the role needs ‘a sixteen-year-old princess with the voice of an Isolde.’ The singer must cut through an enormous orchestra and still sound like a girl, so interpretations differ widely from one singer to the next.

After the violence of Elektra, Strauss and Hofmannsthal wrote this Viennese comedy with Mozart in mind. The resignation of the Marschallin, who yields her lover to a younger woman, rang out again at the composer's funeral after his last day.

• The prelude opens with the horns surging boldly upward, depicting the night shared by the Marschallin and the young Octavian before the curtain rises. It is a passage that demands daring of the horn players.
• In Act II's ‘Presentation of the Rose,’ flutes · celesta (a keyboard instrument that sounds like bells) · harps · solo violin sound glittering chords high above. This is the moment Octavian and Sophie first meet each other's eyes; listen for a sound in which time seems to stand still.
• The waltz of the blustering Baron Ochs is set in eighteenth-century Vienna yet written in the manner of a nineteenth-century Viennese waltz. That deliberate anachronism gives the work its distinctive air of nostalgia.
• In the Act III trio ‘Hab' mir's gelobt,’ the voices of three sopranos rise and intertwine, each carrying a different heart. This passage, in which the Marschallin's resignation and the young lovers' excitement are heard together, was performed at Strauss's funeral.

Music of mourning completed after the opera houses of Munich · Dresden · Vienna, the stages of his whole life, had been destroyed by bombing. The grief of an aged composer who watched German culture collapse gathers at the end into Beethoven's funeral march.

• Ten violins, five violas, five cellos and three double basses — twenty-three players in all, each with a separate part. Listen for the moments when what sounds like an ensemble suddenly lets each individual line rise on its own.
• At the opening, the cellos and violas lay down low, dark harmonies and begin a melody that slowly sinks downward. This short head motif returns throughout the piece, changing shape (transformation) as it goes.
• Near the end, the cellos and double basses sound, low, the theme of the funeral march from the second movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 3, Eroica. At that spot Strauss wrote ‘IN MEMORIAM!’ (in memory).
• Once that quotation appears, you realize that the head motif heard from the very beginning resembled this funeral march all along. Because of it, the whole piece sounds as if it has been walking toward this moment.

Songs for soprano and orchestra that he set to poems by Hesse and Eichendorff at eighty-four, while living in Switzerland. They sound like a farewell that looks calmly at the road walked with Pauline over more than half a century, and at the death drawing near.

• In ‘Frühling’ the soprano sings a long, winding melody high in her range. It is a song of long breaths, and comparing singers' tone and breath control makes for rich listening.
• At the close of ‘September,’ a solo horn bids summer farewell. Listen with the thought that the instrument of his father, a horn player, speaks once more in his last songs.
• In the middle of ‘Beim Schlafengehen,’ a solo violin plays a long, songlike interlude, after which the voice soars at the words about the soul longing to take flight.
• In ‘Im Abendrot,’ two flutes paint larks rising into the sky with a rapid wavering between two notes (trill). After the final ‘Is this perhaps death?’, the ‘transfiguration’ theme from Death and Transfiguration, which he wrote at twenty-six, is quietly quoted.