RICHARD STRAUSS WROTE SYMPHONY AT AGE FIFTEEN

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 100, 27 September 1948, Page 7

RICHARD STRAUSS WROTE SYMPHONY AT AGE FIFTEEN

Eighty-three year old Richard Strauss has been called the “Napoleon of Music.” Last survivor of the German musical giants of the nineteenth century, his greatest work is “Der Rosenkavalier.” Strauss is :ail to have about £IOO,OOO owing to him in royalties on his music played ,during the war. He has been dependent on loans from friends, although his pre-war income, was estimated at £20,000 a year. “I see no glory in going to a pauper’s grave,” he said. Strauss could write musical notes before he knew the letters of the' alphabet. At fifteen he wrote a symphony which was performed under the Court conductor at Munich. As young Strauss went to bow his acknowledgments of the applause, a man ifi the audience turned to his neighbour and asked: “What has that boy got to do with it.” “Nothing,” was the reply, “except that he’s the composer.” In Vienna Strauss used to live in a noise-proof house of his own design, hung with old tapestries and filled with Renaissance furniture. No musical instrument, not even a piano, stood in the bare little room , leading from it, resembling a monk’s cell, where he did all his compising, working at lightning speed. Shortly before he died a hundred years ago, on November 3, 1847, another composer, Mendelssohn, came over and stayed with his wife’s relatives in Denmark Hill, London. There he wrote his immortal “Spring Song,” which was originally, called “Camberwell Green.” A drive to Windsor had been arranged that day, but Mendelssohn, whose full name was Felix Men-delssohn-Bartholdy, elected to stay at home with the children.' Sitting at the piano in the drawing-room, he began to think, but the children resented his withdrawal from their playroom and carrie in to him. He had just begun searching for a lost chord but they pulled his hands from the keyboard. This gave a partaicular character to the music he was composing, causing the introduction to the “Spring Song” of the lovely hurried triplets which contrast with the legato melody. Mendelssohn, who wrote a threeact opera when he was fifteen, died at Leipzig at the early age of 38.