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Donald Macleod explores Richard Strauss’s rather fraught early years as third conductor at the Munich Opera, with music including his orchestral tone poem Tod und Verklärung.

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.

Following a hasty departure by his boss, Hans von Bülow, in 1886 Strauss left his position at Meiningen to join Munich Court Opera. The experience proved to be a steep learning curve.

5 piano pieces op 3
IV: Allegro
Glenn Gould, piano

Serenade in E flat op 7 for 13 wind instruments
Sabine Meyer Wind Ensemble

Piano Quartet in C minor op 13 TrV 137
IV: Finale Vivace
Michael Stepniak, viola
Mendelssohn Piano Trio

Tod und Verklärung, Op. 24 TrV 158
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra
Maris Janssons, director

Morgen! op 27
Jessye Norman, soprano
Leipzig Gewandhaus
Kurt Masur, conductor