Strauss at the turn of the century was seen as an enfant terrible who used music as an instrument for candid, unsentimental, and realist explorations of the human experience. Although embraced by the public, critics attacked his works as self-indulgent; they found him glib and shallow, content with superficial drama punctuated by a desire to shock. After World War I, both the right and left dismissed his lush, hyperrealist aesthetic as a relic of a bygone era, one side lamenting that Strauss was too cosmopolitan and the other ignoring him as benignly irrelevant. When the preeminence enjoyed by radical modernism ended mid-century, a neglected historical reality came into view: the resilience of tradition. In that reassessment, Strauss’ innovations, with those of composers such as Pfitzner, Schrecker, Martinů, Korngold, Zemlinsky, Schoeck, and Braunfels, suggest an alternative formulation of the modern, one that helped define the trajectory of twenty-first-century music.

This chapter examines the profession of music composition during Strauss’s lifetime, noting his success relative to that of his contemporaries while highlighting the many professional difficulties and economic hardships faced by aspiring and established composers alike during the period. Limited performance opportunities, unfavorable publishing and copyright terms, disappearing avenues of patronage, and a lack of standardized credentialing processes or conservatory curricula for composers all contributed to a rather bleak state of affairs for the average composer. The figure of the composer was a complex one during Strauss’s long life, trapped between the nineteenth-century ideal of unfettered inspiration and the often-ugly economic and social reality of the twentieth. Led by Strauss, German composers sought to professionalize their discipline – albeit largely unsuccessfully – seeking reforms in music publishing, copyright, and music education that would place them on a more secure economic footing.

Of the German-language operas composed between Wagner’s Parsifal (1882) and Richard Strauss’s Salome (1905), only Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel (1893) has survived. This chapter surveys the mostly forgotten works that form the context of Strauss’s early operas. In addition to his musical style, Wagner’s concept of redemption through love and reception of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics exerted a powerful influence on the next generation, as seen in music dramas by Max von Schillings (Ingwelde), Pfitzner (Der arme Heinrich), and Strauss (Guntram). The new genre of fairy tale opera (Märchenoper) often presented lighter versions of Wagnerian style and ideology, such as in Hänsel und Gretel, Alexander Ritter’s Der faule Hans, and Siegfried Wagner’s Der Bärenhäuter. Even comic opera was strongly influenced, bifurcating into Meistersinger spinoffs (Schillings’s Der Pfeifertag) and harmless bourgeois idylls (Eugen d’Albert’s Die Abreise). Verismo-influenced hybrids include d’Albert’s Tiefland and Wilhelm Kienzl’s Der Evangelimann. Strauss’s Salome represented an act of liberation.