Title

Strauss And The Business Of Music

Abstract

Many people have thought a love of money the cause of Strauss's decay … paul rosenfeld, the dial (february, 1920) Strauss was the first composer to adopt the gesture of the idealized big industrialist. theodore adorno With the words of a now forgotten journalist from the composer's own day and the more lasting condemnation by perhaps the twentieth century's most influential music and social critic, we are easily reminded of the image of Richard Strauss as a “money grubber, ” which held for much of the last 100 years and only recently has begun to fade. Given a twentieth-century popular culture obsessed with every facet of the lives of celebrities, especially professional athletes, actors, and musicians, it is not surprising that so many people in Strauss's day were curious to know the details of his finances. For several decades - from the mid 1890s to at least the 1920s - he was the undisputed leading figure in serious music for Europe and America. With his audacious tone poems and scandalous operas, he and his music commanded headlines in ways that later composers of art music could only envy. A longer view of history reveals, however, that Strauss is hardly the first significant composer to be placed in a less-than-flattering light where music and money were connected. In the late Middle Ages, there is evidence of priest-composers angling for multiple benefices, with little work to support themselves. In the Renaissance, Josquin des Prez was known for both his high fees and his lack of deference to his employer's wishes.

Publication Date

1-1-2010

Publication Title

The Cambridge Companion to Richard Strauss

Number of Pages

242-256

Document Type

Article; Book Chapter

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521899307.015

Socpus ID

84932117531 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/84932117531

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