Richard Georg Strauss was born in Munich, Germany, the son of the well-known composer and musician Franz Strauss. He began his involvement with music, therefore, from an earlier age and became one of the leading composers of the early modern era. His most popular works included the opera Der Rosenkavalier and the tone poems Death and Transfiguration and, Also sprach Zarathustra. He had married into a Jewish family and his fame enabled him to protect, to a point, his relatives during the Nazi period. He died in 1949. (By John Osborne)
Source Citation
Michael Kennedy, Richard Strauss: Man, Musician, Enigma (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 6-7.