The parental Home

The horn player Franz Joseph Strauss (1822 – 1905) was already 42 years old when his second wife (the first had been carried off by cholera) bore him a son, Richard. "He was a so-called character”. So begins the "Memories of my Father” by Richard Strauss. The son’s gratitude for the education and encouragement his father offered him is mixed with gentle criticism of the father’s authoritarian manner. "A difficult childhood had made my father bitter. […] At home he was violent, irascible and tyrannical. It needed my sweet mother’s entire gentleness and goodness to maintain a harmonious relationship between my parents even though their marriage was always born by genuine love and respect.” The later nervous disorder of Josepha (nèe Pschorr, 1838 – 1910), Richard’s sensitive mother, was, at least, nourished by the patriarchal family situation: "To what extent, however, my mother’s very sensitive nerves really suffered, I can no longer decide.” Both parents bequeathed the boy positive qualities: thrift and level headedness from his father, sensibility and a "poetic bent” from his mother.

Richard’s mother helped write down the text of the first compositional attempts while his father involved him in chamber music and performed the early works of the thirteen-year old with the orchestral society Wilde Gung’l. Thanks to his father – and from a certain point against his father – Richard Strauss very quickly developed into an outstanding, independent musician. And although Franz did not appreciate his son’s interest in Wagner and Liszt, he remained an untiring source of advice. Countless letters to and from Richard’s parents testify to the closeness of their relationship and the correspondence covers almost everything: the young man’s travel impressions, health concerns, his initially sweeping conducting style against which his father advised and the bold talent of the emerging composer that Strauss senior always sought to control in the spirit of the Viennese classics. Franz Joseph Strauss died seven months before the first performance of his son’s opera Salome and never witnessed the "opera revolution” the work sparked.

Father Strauss also recommended friendly diplomacy toward Pauline de Ahna: ‘Miss de Ahna seems a somewhat exalted lady but an educated man can sometimes turn a blind eye without conceding anything.’ Richard’s mother was also optimistic when Richard and Pauline exchanged their vows, ‘because her light-hearted, clever nature will always cheer you up and she knows how to look after you so lovingly.’