Franz Strauss - Introduction, Theme and Variations, Op. 13 (1875)

Franz Joseph Strauss (26 February 1822 – 31 May 1905) was a German musician. He was a composer, a virtuoso horn player and accomplished performer on the guitar, clarinet and viola. He was principal horn player of the Bavarian Court Opera for more than 40 years, a teacher at the Royal School of Music, Munich, and a conductor. He was the father of Richard Strauss. Please support my channel: Introduction, Theme and Variations in E-flat major for Horn and Piano, Op. 13 (1875) Jean-Jacques Justafré - horn and François-René Duchâble - piano. Strauss’s first horn concerto was premiered, with the composer playing the horn part, in 1865 and he remained greatly in demand as a conductor Hans von Bülow called him “the Joachim of the horn“. In 1871, he was appointed professor at the Royal School of Music; he was given the rank of Kammermusiker of the Bavarian court in 1873. Strauss’s musical preferences were strongly classical; he loved the music of Mozart above all other, and also particularly admired Haydn, Beethoven, and Schubert. He was not in sympathy with the new music of Wagner which his sovereign and employer, Ludwig II of Bavaria, assiduously promoted with productions at the Court Opera. Strauss’s antipathy to modern music influenced the early development of his son, Richard, who began as a composer in a traditional vein, not finding himself drawn to modernism until he had left paternal influence behind him during his time at Munich University. Despite his personal distaste for Wagner, both as a man and a musician, Strauss’s strict professionalism drove him to devote all his technical mastery to the important horn solos in Wagner’s operas. He led the horn section in the premieres of Tristan und Isolde, Das Rheingold, and Die Walküre. Wagner said, “Strauss is a detestable fellow but when he blows his horn one cannot sulk with him.“ At the conductor Hermann Levi’s invitation, Strauss played in the premiere of Parsifal at Bayreuth in 1882. After a bad attack of influenza, Strauss was unable to play the horn for 18 months, but continued to play in the Court Opera orchestra as a violist, in which capacity he took part in the first performance in Munich of Wagner’s Tannhäuser. In 1875 Strauss was elected conductor of the amateur orchestra, the “Wilde Gung’l“, a post he held for 21 years. Among the players was his son, who learned the practicalities of orchestration there, and wrote some of his first compositions for the orchestra. Strauss retired from the opera orchestra in 1889, though he continued his conducting and taught for some years thereafter. He died in Munich at the age of 83.