Chapter 20 - The Conductor

Summary

Richard Strauss’s death on September 8, 1949 marked the end of an era. With his passing, the dominance of the conductor-composer was no more. With his great contemporaries, Gustav Mahler and Felix Weingartner, Strauss helped to shape the musical landscape of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to pave the way for subsequent generations of conductors to build on their interpretative reforms and performance practices. This chapter investigates the ways in which Strauss interacted professionally with conducting colleagues, their early training, their rise through the ranks of the music profession, their approaches to programming, their management of orchestral musicians and singers (within both the rehearsal and performance environments), their physical gestures on the podium, their fee structures, and their interpretative practices when realizing works from the Central-European Canon.