RICHARD STRAUS  grew up in a musical family – his father  Franz  Strauss was a solo horn player at the Royal Opera House in Munich, where as a child the future composer regularly attended orchestral rehearsals, watched opera performances and began composing at the age of six. He later became the conductor of the orchestra, famous as one of the greatest conductors of his time. The great knowledge of the symphony orchestra, combined with the rich impressions of the opera scene, allow him to skillfully use the timbre and technical capabilities of each instrument, to turn it into a “personalized hero” in his almost theatrical symphonic poems “Don Juan”, “Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks”, “Don Quixote”, etc.), and his scenic “Alpine Symphony” is one of the last grandiose opuses of the hypertrophied late romantic symphony. If with his program poems Strauss crowned the long history of this typical romantic symphonic genre of the XIX century, then from the beginning of the twentieth century he took the path of one of the most prolific and performed opera composers, who left masterpieces like Salome and Electra – one of the first striking examples of the new expressionist aesthetics, The Knight of the Rose, Ariadne of Naxos, The Shadowless Woman, The Egyptian Helen, Arabella, The Silent Woman, Daphne, The Love of Danae, Capriccio and others.