Free Richard Strauss sheet music
4 Richard Strauss scores on Artform's shelf, ordered easiest to read first. Every score here is public domain, free to read, print and keep.
Open the sheet music libraryRichard Strauss (1864-1949)
German composer, no relation to the Viennese waltz family, who wrote enormous tone poems in his twenties and thirties and then spent decades writing operas of extraordinary refinement. The opening of Also sprach Zarathustra is one of the most recognised passages in music. His conduct in Nazi Germany is not a simple story and should not be told as one: he accepted an official music post, used it in part to protect his Jewish daughter-in-law and grandsons, was removed from it in 1935 over a letter the Gestapo intercepted, and was cleared after the war. The Four Last Songs, written at eighty-four, are a farewell to everything.
Start with these
The easiest Richard Strauss on the shelf, in order. Nothing here is graded and nobody is ranked: the shelf simply puts the pieces that ask less of your hands before the ones that ask more.
How the reader works
Each score opens as engraved notation you can read from the stand, and it plays: hear the piece first, then slow it down and loop the bar that is not working. There is nothing to install and no account to make. When you want paper, print it.
Every file is MusicXML, so MuseScore, Sibelius, Finale and Dorico open them too.
Where to go next
If you are learning Richard Strauss rather than only reading, the scale pages cover fingering in every key, the chord pages spell out every chord, and the symbol dictionary explains any mark on the page you do not recognise.