What does Ein Heldenleben mean in English?
Ein Heldenleben is usually, and not incorrectly, translated as A Hero’s Life; argument, however, could be made that A Heroic Life comes as close, or closer.
Is Ein Heldenleben a symphony?
Ein Heldenleben employs the technique of leitmotif that Richard Wagner used, but almost always as elements of its enlarged sonata-rondo symphonic structure.
In which Strauss tone poem did the composer see himself as the hero?
On one level, Richard Strauss’ 1898 tone poem, Ein Heldenleben, Op. 40 (A Hero’s Life), is a musical autobiography. Filled with unflinching bravado, it ventures where few pieces dare to go, casting the composer as hero.
What is a interesting fact about Richard Strauss?
Richard Strauss was born on 11 June 1864. His father Franz was a principal horn player who gave Richard a solid musical education. The boy wrote his first composition, aged six. In 1872 he started receiving violin instruction at the Royal School of Music from Benno Walter, his father’s cousin.
What was Strauss first great operatic success?
Guntram
The triumphant reception of this piece led to Strauss’s acclamation as Wagner’s heir and marked the start of his successful composing career. At Weimar, too, in 1894 he conducted the premiere of his first opera, Guntram, with his fiancée Pauline de Ahna in the leading soprano role.
How many tone poems did Richard Strauss compose?
It is perhaps also true than Strauss’s six great tone poems can be seen as mini-operas for the orchestra, and nowhere more so than in Don Quixote, with its virtuoso part for solo cello (Don Quixote) and solo viola (Sancho Panza).
What kind of music did Strauss write?
classical composer
More than 50 years after his death, and given the popularity of his many operas, orchestral pieces and lieder, Strauss remained the most performed classical composer of the 20th century.
How did Richard Strauss learn music?
Through his father’s connections, Strauss on leaving school met the leading musicians of the day, including the conductor Hans von Bülow, who commissioned Strauss’s Suite for 13 Winds for the Meiningen Orchestra and invited Strauss to conduct that work’s first performance in Munich in November 1884.
How many works did Richard Strauss have?
140 works
During a conventional education, Strauss still devoted most of his time and energy to music. When he left school in 1882, he had already composed more than 140 works, including 59 lieder (art songs) and various chamber and orchestral works.