Japanese Festival Music
composition by Richard Strauss
Japanese Festival Music, Op. 84 (1940), is a composition by Richard Strauss. The full title is Festmusik zur Feier des 2600jährigen Bestehens des Kaiserreichs Japan für großes Orchester (Japanische Festmusik).
History
The Japanese government commissioned music from composers of six nations to mark the 2600th Anniversary Celebrations of the Japanese Empire. Other composers writing for the festivities included:
Hisato Ohzawa who wrote his Symphony no. 3, "Symphony of the Founding of Japan"
Jacques Ibert who wrote an Ouverture de fête "pour célébrer le 26e centenaire de la fondation de l'empire Nippon"
Ildebrando Pizzetti who wrote a Symphony "In Celebrazione dell XXVIo Centenario della Fondazione dell'Impero Giapponese"
Sándor Veress who wrote his first symphony, "Hungarian Greetings on the 2600th Anniversary of the Japanese Dynasty"
Benjamin Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem was also commissioned in this process, but was ultimately rejected by the Japanese foreign ministry as an insult.
Japan's request for a composition from an American composer was turned down due to the deterioration of relations between the countries.
Joseph Goebbels assigned the Japanese commission to Germany's most prominent composer, Richard Strauss. Strauss, age 75, put aside composition on his opera Die Liebe der Danae to work on Japanese Festival Music while staying in the Italian Tyrol. He completed the work on April 22, 1940 and received 10,000 Reichsmarks for his effort.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Japanese Festival Music” as composition by Richard Strauss. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as composition by Richard Strauss. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2160583. VIAF identifies the subject as 241187774. The Library of Congress control number is no00029336. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1940.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Japanese Festival Music” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.