Richard Georg Strauss was a German composer and conductor best known for his tone poems and operas. Considered a leading composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras, he has been described as a successor of Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt. Along with Gustav Mahler, he represents the late flowering of German Romanticism, in which pioneering subtleties of orchestration are combined with an advanced harmonic style.
Bruno Walter was a German-born conductor, pianist and composer. Born in Berlin, he escaped Nazi Germany in 1933, was naturalised as a French citizen in 1938, and settled in the United States in 1939. He worked closely with Gustav Mahler, whose music he helped to establish in the repertory, held major positions with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Concertgebouw Orchestra, Salzburg Festival, Vienna State Opera, Bavarian State Opera, Staatsoper Unter den Linden and Deutsche Oper Berlin, among others, made recordings of historical and artistic significance, and is widely considered to be one of the great conductors of the 20th century.
Arnold Zweig was a German Jewish writer, pacifist and socialist. He is best known for his six-part cycle on World War I.
Romain Rolland was a French dramatist, novelist, essayist, art historian and mystic who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915 "as a tribute to the lofty idealism of his literary production and to the sympathy and love of truth with which he has described different types of human beings".
Karl August Leopold Böhm was an Austrian conductor. He was best known for his performances of the music of Mozart, Wagner, and Richard Strauss.
The World of Yesterday: Memoires of a European is the memoir of Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. It has been called the most famous book on the Habsburg Empire. He started writing it in 1934 when, anticipating Anschluss and Nazi persecution, he uprooted himself from Austria to England and later to Brazil. He posted the manuscript, typed by his second wife Lotte Altmann, to the publisher the day before they both committed suicide in February 1942. The book was first published in the original German-language by an anti-Nazi Exilliteratur publishing firm based in Stockholm (1942), as Die Welt von Gestern. It was first published in English in April 1943 by Viking Press. In 2011, Plunkett Lake Press reissued it in eBook form. In 2013, the University of Nebraska Press published a translation by the noted British translator Anthea Bell.
Franz Joseph Strauss 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.
Hans Hotter was a German operatic bass-baritone. He stood 6 feet 4 inches (1.93 m) and his appearance was striking. His voice and diction were equally recognisable.
Clemens Heinrich Krauss was an Austrian conductor and opera impresario, particularly associated with the music of Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss and Richard Wagner. He founded the New Year's Concert of the Vienna Philharmonic and conducted it until 1954.
Hans Knappertsbusch was a German conductor, best known for his performances of the music of Wagner, Bruckner and Richard Strauss.
The Violin Concerto in D minor, Op. 8, is a concertante work written from 1881 to 1882 by the German composer Richard Strauss.
The National Theatre on Max-Joseph-Platz in Munich, Germany, is a historic opera house, home of the Bavarian State Opera, Bavarian State Orchestra and the Bavarian State Ballet.
Viorica Ursuleac was a Romanian operatic dramatic soprano.
Die schweigsame Frau, Op. 80, is a 1935 comic opera in three acts by Richard Strauss to a libretto by Stefan Zweig after Ben Jonson's 1609 comedy Epicœne, or The Silent Woman.
Julius Patzak was an Austrian tenor distinguished in operatic and concert work. He was particularly noted in Mozart, Beethoven and in early 20th-century German repertoire.
Joseph Gregor was an Austrian writer, theater historian and librettist. He served as director of the Austrian National Library.
"Sehnsucht" is an art song for voice and piano composed by Richard Strauss in 1896, setting a poem of the same title by the German poet Detlev von Liliencron (1844–1909). It is the second song in his collection Five songs for voice and piano, Op. 32, TrV 174.
Richard Strauss composed his Horn Concerto No. 2 in E-flat major, whilst living in Vienna in 1942. The work was premiered in 1943 at the Salzburg Festival and was recorded in 1944, both with solo horn Gottfried von Freiberg. The score was published by Boosey & Hawkes of London in 1950. It was taken up and popularised by the British horn player Dennis Brain. It has since become the most performed and recorded horn concerto of the 20th century.
Peter Petersen is a German musicologist and professor emeritus of the University of Hamburg. He focus on 20th-century music, rhythm, and was instrumental in the university's Exile Music Working Group and the online Lexikon verfolgter Musiker und Musikerinnen der NS-Zeit.
