Richard Strauss: Romanze Es-Dur fur klarinette und orchester

📒 In Richard Strauss's earliest creative period, when he was not yet burdened by crises concerning the relationship of form and content, he already displayed a marked preference for the single movement 'salon piece', close to the Lied in form. Strauss wrote many romancelike, cantabile works alongside the ambitious, sometimes rather forced large-scale forms of the sonatas and concertos, and these smaller forms often seem to have been better suited to his lyrical gift. Thus, for example, the large-scale Cello Sonata in F major, Op. 6, composed in Staffelstein and Munich between 1881 and 1883, was not followed by a work in the same form and for the same instruments, but by the single-movement Romance for Cello in F major, WoO AV 75, marked 'andante cantabile', which Willi Schuh has called 'one of the most mature of the early works'.