大象传媒

Donald Macleod explores the life and music of Richard Strauss, hailed in his youthful fame as 'the outstanding living composer'. He begins by focusing on Strauss' early works, which frame the story of his final days. As the composer wrote on his deathbed, 'dying is just as I composed it in Death and Transfiguration'.

Donald Macleod also examines the events in the composer's early career that led him to develop an iron will to reinvent musical forms and push Romanticism to its limits.

At the time of the First World War, his music began to show an even more profound sense of irony. His incidental music for Le bourgeois gentilhomme is a typical example, presenting the style and mood of 18th century music in a 20th-century manner.

Finally, Macleod examines his controversial role as the leading German composer of the Nazi era, and introduces what has been called 'the most challenging tonal choral work ever written', his Deutsche Motette.