Not Richard and Famous: Chris Walton is entertained by a biography of a composer who played bit parts in the lives of Wagner and Strauss

Review of Michael Hofmeister, Alexander Ritter: Leben und Werk eines Komponisten zwischen Wagner und Strauss, Frankfurter Wagner-Kontexte, i. (Tectum Verlag, 2018).

July 2019, Volume 13, Number 2, 83–5.

The name Alexander Ritter is well known to just about anyone with an interest in Richard Strauss – he figures in all the books as one of several father-figures acquired by the young composer, and he played a crucial role in the gestation of Strauss’s first-ever opera. But given that the ghastly Guntram is a kind of Monty Python and the Holy Grail without the humour, it is perhaps not surprising that Ritter, its fons et origo, should have shared its fate of being largely ignored since.

Wagnerians are also accustomed to coming across the Ritter family – but it’s rarely Alexander we read about.