The Domestic Symphony (Sinfonia Domestica) is the story of a family for one day. There is the father motif, the mother motif and the baby motif! The final fugue represents education very aptly for you get from it the sense of flight and struggle and the never endingness of education.
One of his last works is The Alpine Symphony. His other works include an early opera Feuersnoth, and his songs which are among the greatest ever written by any composer, ranking him with Franz, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Hugo Wolf.
Strauss shows in all his work great pictorial power. He paints in tones if ever a man does. His humor in music is amazing. He tries to make vivid in music a thing as simple as a fork and as complex as a philosophic idea. Some one said of him, comparing him to Wagner, that he started out to write symphonic poems and really wrote music dramas, while Wagner started out to write music dramas and ended by writing Tristan and Isolde, a super-symphonic poem with voices added.
Richard Strauss is the last of the great German classic and romantic composers who have ruled the musical world for the past two centuries. Still living in Germany he has opened the way to many of the younger composers, who have learned much from his methods of orchestration and handling music in the large forms. While he out-Wagnered Wagner in strange and new harmony, he now seems old fashioned in comparison to Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Honegger. Although Strauss seemed to us very complex and exaggerated a few years ago, it was very interesting to notice that when his works were revived in America after the War, the audiences had grown up musically to the point where they seemed no longer unintelligible or ultra-modern.
We remember when we were leaving the opera house after the first performance of Salome in this country, hearing one ill bred, untutored woman say, “Gee! Goit, but that was one big noise!” By this time she has probably reached the point where she is jazzing the Salome dance with real pleasure and understanding!
He did many unusual things with instruments, added many new ones, and as someone said, he loves to have the “trombone play like a piccolo!”
No one can say where Strauss will stand as a composer, for time alone can place him. However, we make bold to state that he will stand high in the company of the world’s composers.
Chabrier (1841–1894)
As imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, there is no proof of the success of the tone poem more telling than the fact that practically every composer in the musical world has written symphonic tone poems. In fact today, one hundred tone poems are written to one symphony! Berlioz had his followers in France, and in the group around César Franck were several who wrote tone poems. One of the most charming of these poets was Alexis Emanuel Chabrier (1841–1894) who took up music first as an amateur while studying law in Paris, and while he was Minister of the Interior. Later he became so devoted to music that he gave all his time to it.
Among his works are operas and many other forms of music, the loveliest of which is the Rhapsody on Spanish tunes called España. It is a model of its kind and in it he uses the collected material with rare skill. It shows him very clever in reproducing foreign atmosphere and feeling. He was born in Ambert, France, and died in Paris.