Symphonia Domestica
The work
‘It is quite clear, then, that he has thought it worthwhile to put about 100 people to a great deal of trouble and expense in order to suggest the imbecile spectacle of a baby shrieking in its bath.’ So wrote the English music critic Ernest Newman in 1905 after the English premiere of Richard Strauss’s , an orchestral tone poem lasting 45 minutes. Newman pulled no punches in his estimation of Strauss’s newest piece. ‘Sheer inanity,’ he called
