Tim Page
The New York Review of Books
January 31, 2015
By the time Richard Strauss died in 1949, many musicians and critics considered him an embarrassing fossil. Born in 1864 while Berlioz and Rossini still lived--and a dozen years before Johannes Brahms had written any of his own symphonies--Strauss composed steadily for some sixty-five years and passed away a few months after the premieres of Elliott Carter's Cello Sonata and John Cage's Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano. But the path he took long overshadowed a clear assessment of his enormous accomplishments as a composer of opera and orchestral music.
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