Leben Jesu (1835). The work produced an immense sensation and created a new epoch in the treatment of the rise of Christianity. In 1837 Strauss replied to his critics (Streitschriften zur Verteidigung meiner Schrift über das Leben Jesu). In the third edition of the work (1839), and in Zwei friedliche Blätter, he made important concessions to his critics, which he withdrew, however, in the fourth edition (1840; translated into English by George Eliot, with Latin preface by Strauss, 1846). In 1840 and the following year he published his Christliche Glaubenslehre (2 vols.), the principle of which is that the history of Christian doctrines is their disintegration. Between the publication of this work and that of the Friedliche Blätter he had been elected to a chair of theology in the university of Zürich. But the appointment provoked such a storm of popular ill will in the canton that the authorities considered it wise to pension him before he entered upon his duties, although this concession came too late to save the government. With his Glaubenslehre he took leave of theology for upwards of twenty years. In August 1841 he married Agnes Schebest, a cultivated and beautiful opera singer of high repute, but not adapted to be the wife of a scholar and literary man like Strauss. Five years afterwards, when two children had been born, a separation by arrangement was made. Strauss resumed his literary activity by the publication of Der Romantiker auf dem Thron der Cäsaren, in which he drew a satirical parallel between Julian the Apostate and Frederick William IV. of Prussia (1847). In 1848 he was nominated as member of the Frankfort parliament, but was defeated. He was elected for the Württemberg chamber, but his action was so conservative that his constituents requested him to resign his seat. He forgot his political disappointments in the production of a series of biographical works, which secured for him a permanent place in German literature (Schubarts Leben, 2 vols., 1849; Christian Märklin, 1851; Nikodemus Frischlin, 1855; Ulrich von Hutten, 3 vols., 1858-1860, 6th ed. 1895; H. S. Reimarus, 1862). With this last-named work he returned to theology, and two years afterwards (1864) published his Leben Jesu für das deutsche Volk (13th ed., 1904). It failed to produce an effect comparable with that of the first Life, but the replies to it were many, and Strauss answered them in his pamphlet Die Halben und die Ganzen (1865), directed specially against Schenkel and Hengstenberg. His Christus des Glaubens und der Jesus der Geschichte (1865) is a severe criticism of Schleiermacher's lectures on the life of Jesus, which were then first published. From 1865 to 1872 Strauss resided in Darmstadt, and in 1870 published his lectures on Voltaire (9th ed., 1907). His last work, Der alte und der neue Glaube (1872; 16th ed., 1904; English translation by M. Blind, 1873), produced almost as great a sensation as his Life of Jesus, and not least amongst Strauss's own friends, who wondered at his one-sided view of Christianity and his professed abandonment of spiritual philosophy for the materialism of modern science. To the fourth edition of the book he added a Nachwort als Vorwort (1873). The same year symptoms of a fatal malady appeared, and death followed on the 8th of February 1874.
Strauss's mind was almost exclusively analytical and critical, without depth of religious feeling or philosophical penetration, or historical sympathy; his work was accordingly rarely constructive. His Life of Jesus was directed against not only the traditional orthodox view of the Gospel narratives, but likewise the rationalistic treatment of them, whether after the manner of Reimarus or that of Paulus. The mythical theory that the Christ of the Gospels, excepting the most meagre outline of personal history, was the unintentional creation of the early Christian Messianic expectation he applied with merciless rigour to the narratives. But his operations were based upon fatal defects, positive and negative. He held a narrow theory as to the miraculous, a still narrower as to the relation of the divine to the human, and he had no true idea of the nature of historical tradition, while, as F. C. Baur complained, his critique of the Gospel history had not been preceded by the essential preliminary critique of the Gospels themselves.
Authorities. — Strauss's works were published in a collected edition in 12 vols., by E. Zeller (1876-1878), without his Christliche Dogmatik. His Ausgewählte Briefe appeared in 1895. On his life and works, see E. Zeller, David Friedrich Strauss in seinem Leben und seinen Schriften (1874); A. Hausrath, D. F. Strauss und die Theologie seiner Zeit (2 vols., 1876-1878); F. J. Vischer, Kritische Gänge (1844), vol. i., and by the same writer, Altes und Neues (1882), vol. iii.; R. Gottschall, Literarische Charakterköpfe (1896), vol. iv.; S. Eck, D. F. Strauss (1899); K. Harraeus, D. F. Strauss, sein Leben und seine Schriften (1901); and T. Ziegler, D. F. Strauss (2 vols., 1908-1909).
STRAUSS, JOHANN (1804-1849), Austrian orchestral
conductor and composer of dance-music, was born at Vienna on the
14th of March 1804. In 1819 he obtained his first engagement
as a violinist in a small band then playing at the Sperl, in the
Leopoldstadt, and after acting as deputy-conductor in another
orchestra, he organized in 1825 a little band of fourteen
performers on his own account. It was during the carnival of 1826
that Strauss inaugurated a long line of triumphs by introducing
his band to the public of Vienna at the Schwan, in the Rossau
suburb, where his famous Täuberl-Walzer (op. 1) at once established
his reputation as the best composer of dance-music then
living. Upon the strength of this success he was invited back to
the Sperl, where he accepted an engagement, with an increased
orchestra, for six years. Soon after this he was appointed
kapellmeister to the 1st Burger regiment, and entrusted with the duty
of providing the music for the court balls; while the number of
his private engagements was so great that he found it necessary
to enlarge his band from time to time until it consisted of
more than two hundred performers. In 1833 he began a long
and extended series of tours throughout northern Europe,
eventually visiting England in 1838. In Paris he associated
himself with Musard, whose quadrilles became not much less
popular than his own waltzes; but his greatest successes were
achieved in London, where he arrived in time for the coronation
of Queen Victoria, and played at seventy-two public concerts,
besides innumerable balls and other private entertainments.
The fatigue of these long journeys seriously injured Strauss's
health; but he soon resumed his duties at the Sperl; and on the
5th of May 1840 he removed with his band to the Imperial
“Volksgarten,” which thenceforth became the scene of his most
memorable successes, his conducting being marked by a quiet
power which ensured the perfection of every minutest nuance.
In 1844 Strauss began another extensive series of tours. In 1849 he revisited London, and, after his farewell concert, was escorted down the Thames by a squadron of boats, in one of which a band played tunes in his honour. This was his last public triumph. On his return to Vienna he was attacked with scarlet fever, of which he died on the 25th of September 1849.
Strauss was survived by three sons — Johann (1825-1899), Joseph (1827-1870) and Eduard (b. 1835), all of whom distinguished themselves as composers of dance-music, and assisted in recruiting the ranks and perpetuating the traditions of the still famous band.
STRAUSS, RICHARD (1864- ), German composer, was
born at Munich on the 11th of June 1864, the son of Franz Strauss, an eminent hornist. To some extent a prodigy, Strauss was something of a pianist at four, a composer at six, and at ten he was already seriously studying music under F. W. Meyer, the Munich Hofkapellmeister. Soon the result of this study began to make itself apparent. Singers sang Strauss's songs; the Walter Quartet played his Quartet in A (op. 2); Hermann Levi performed his D minor Symphony — a work that does not figure in the composer's list; and Bülow took the composer under his wing and introduced his early Serenade for wind instruments to the Meiningen public. For obvious reasons Strauss had not yet found himself. He had passed through the gymnasium and the university, and his music studies had been thorough. But all this had made of the youth merely an excellent technical musician, who in his Eight Songs (op. 10) and in his Pianoforte Quartet (op. 13) showed how strongly he was influenced by predecessors, Liszt in the one case, Mendelssohn in the other. Bülow's efforts to kindle in Strauss something of the fire of his own enthusiasm for Brahms's work ultimately proved fruitless. But to Bülow, and even more to Alexander Ritter, Strauss owed the awakening in his own mind of the interest in the modern development of music that eventually in its ripeness placed
Strauss at the very top of the composers' tree of his time. In
