His first opera to achieve international fame was Salome, which used a libretto by Hedwig Lachmann that was a German translation of the French play Salomé by Oscar Wilde.

His last operas, Daphne, Friedenstag, Die Liebe der Danae and Capriccio used libretti written by Joseph Gregor, the Viennese theatre historian.

Further, Strauss insisted on using a Jewish librettist, Stefan Zweig, for his opera Die schweigsame Frau which ultimately led to his firing from the Reichsmusikkammer and Bayreuth.

His opera Friedenstag, which premiered just before the outbreak of World War II, was a thinly veiled criticism of the Nazi Party that attempted to persuade Germans to abandon violence for peace.

Thanks to his influence, his daughter-in-law was placed under protected house arrest during the war, but despite extensive efforts he was unable to save dozens of his in-laws from being killed in Nazi concentration camps.

In 1872, he started receiving violin instruction from Benno Walter, the director of the Munich Court Orchestra and his father's cousin, and at 11 began five years of compositional study with Friedrich Wilhelm Meyer.

[3] In early 1882, in Vienna, Strauss gave the first performance of his Violin Concerto in D minor, playing a piano reduction of the orchestral part himself, with his teacher Benno Walter as soloist.

He left a year later to go to Berlin, where he studied briefly before securing a post with the Meiningen Court Orchestra as assistant conductor to Hans von Bülow, who had been enormously impressed by the young composer's Serenade (Op.

[1] In December 1885, Bülow unexpectedly resigned from his post, and Strauss was left to lead the Meiningen Court Orchestra as interim principal conductor for the remainder of the artistic season through April 1886.

[1] In May 1889 Strauss left his post with the Bavarian State Opera after being appointed Kapellmeister to Charles Alexander, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach in Weimar, beginning in the autumn of 1889.

His tone poem Don Juan premiered in Weimar on 11 November 1889 to tremendous critical response, and the work quickly brought him international fame and success.

While working in Munich for the next four years he had his largest creative period of tone poem composition, producing Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks (1895), Also sprach Zarathustra (1896), Don Quixote (1897), and Ein Heldenleben (1898).

[4] In 1906, Strauss purchased a block of land at Garmisch-Partenkirchen and had a villa (Strauss-Villa [de]) built there with the down payments from the publisher Adolph Fürstner[5] for his opera Salome,[6][7] residing there until his death.

Several colleagues, including Max Reinhardt, signed, but Strauss refused, and his response was recorded with approval by the French critic Romain Rolland in his diary for October 1914: "Declarations about war and politics are not fitting for an artist, who must give his attention to his creations and his works.

For reasons of expediency, however, he was initially drawn into cooperating with the early Nazi regime in the hope that Hitler—an ardent Wagnerian and music lover who had admired Strauss's work since viewing Salome in 1907—would promote German art and culture.

In 1933, Strauss wrote in his private notebook: I consider the Streicher–Goebbels Jew-baiting as a disgrace to German honour, as evidence of incompetence—the basest weapon of untalented, lazy mediocrity against a higher intelligence and greater talent.

I accepted this honorary office because I hoped that I would be able to do some good and prevent worse misfortunes, if from now onwards German musical life were going to be, as it was said, "reorganized" by amateurs and ignorant place-seekers.

[1] When his Jewish daughter-in-law Alice was placed under house arrest in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in 1938, Strauss used his connections in Berlin, including opera-house General Intendant Heinz Tietjen, to secure her safety.

Conceived and written during the blackest days of World War II, the piece expresses Strauss's mourning of, among other things, the destruction of German culture—including the bombing of every great opera house in the nation.

[1] The metaphor "Indian summer" has been used by journalists, biographers, and music critics, notably[25] Norman Del Mar in 1964,[26] to describe Strauss's late creative upsurge from 1942 to the end of his life.

Short of money, in 1947 Strauss embarked on his last international tour, a three-week trip to London, in which he conducted several of his tone poems and excerpts of his operas, and was present during a complete staging of Elektra by the BBC.

The new influences from Ritter resulted in what is widely regarded[34] as Strauss's first piece to show his mature personality, the tone poem Don Juan (1888), which displays a new kind of virtuosity in its bravura orchestral manner.

Strauss went on to write a series of increasingly ambitious tone poems: Death and Transfiguration (1889), Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks (1895), Also sprach Zarathustra (1896), Don Quixote (1897), Ein Heldenleben (1898), Symphonia Domestica (1903) and An Alpine Symphony (1911–1915).

[36] Many later performances of the opera were also successful, not only with the general public but also with Strauss's peers: Maurice Ravel said that Salome was "stupendous";[37] Gustav Mahler described it as "a live volcano, a subterranean fire".

Strauss often remarked that he preferred writing for the female voice, which is apparent in these two sister operas—the male parts are almost entirely smaller roles, included only to supplement the soprano's performance.

Early in Strauss's career, eminent musicologist Hugo Riemann reflected "His last works only too clearly reveal his determination to make a sensation at all costs".

His 1929 performances of Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks and Don Juan with the Berlin State Opera Orchestra have long been considered the best of his early electrical recordings.

In 1944, Strauss celebrated his 80th birthday and conducted the Vienna Philharmonic in recordings of his own major orchestral works, as well as his seldom-heard Schlagobers (Whipped Cream) ballet music.

Gutmann wrote: It is true, as the critics suggest, that the readings forego overt emotion, but what emerges instead is a solid sense of structure, letting the music speak convincingly for itself.

It is also true that Strauss's tempos are generally swift, but this, too, contributes to the structural cohesion and in any event is fully in keeping with our modern outlook in which speed is a virtue and attention spans are defined more by MTV clips and news sound bites than by evenings at the opera and thousand page novels.