Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra & Mariss Jansons - Strauss: Also sprach Zarathustra, Op. 30, TrV 176 (Live) (2020) [Hi-Res]

It was as an obedient pupil of his father, the celebrated horn player Franz Strauss, that Richard Strauss began his musical career – entirely in the spirit of the classics and early Romantics, with proven forms and traditional genres. Strauss senior loathed Richard Wagner’s monstrous music dramas as well as the achievements of the “New German School” around Franz Liszt, with its avant-garde tone poems and extra-musical programmes. As Richard grew up, he shared his father’s views unquestioningly – but then found a mentor in Hans von Bülow, who, of all people, had once worked together very closely with Wagner. In 1885, Bülow engaged the 21-year-old Strauss as conductor of the Meiningen Court Orchestra. Its concert master, the radical Wagnerian Alexander Ritter, took the young man under his wing and acquainted him with the blessings of “progressive music” – with the result that Richard Strauss soon began composing symphonic poems himself.