Cosima Liszt, daughter of the composer Franz Liszt and Marie d´Agoult, rushed into an unsuccessful marriage with the composer and conductor Hans von Bülow. She wrote articles and visited cultural highlights in Berlin. In Munich 1864 she engaged in the love affair with Richard Wagner and a year later the child Isolde was born. She married him in 1870 in order to have the birth of Siegfried legalised and asked Bülow for a divorce. Her meticulous diaries of her life with him are a vital biographical source, although in them she perpetuates the traditional narrative of the autonomous male genius. After his death she took over the direction of the Bayreuth Festspiele and developed a style committed to Wagner’s performance practice. She excelled in matters of gesture, fusing singing aesthetic, gesture, and word/music relationship.

As we look back on Strauss’s long and prodigious career, it might all seem to be the inevitable product of superlative technique and talent – so much so that we might overlook the people who contributed to Strauss’s career and legacy from his days as a child prodigy to the recording studio decades after his death. This chapter takes stock of a wide range of figures who helped to set Strauss along his professional path, including aunts, uncles, and other extended family, his father Franz, the conductors Hans von Bülow, Franz Wüllner, Ernst von Schuch, Gustav Mahler, Franz Schalk, Hans Knappertsbusch, Karl Böhm, and Clemens Krauss, and singers Maria Jeritza, Lotte Lehman, Richard Mayr, Anna Bahr-Mildenburg, Marie Gutheil-Schoder, and Elisabeth Schumann. In various ways, some direct and others indirect, these champions contributed to the success and legacy of one of Germany’s most enduring composers.

Three figures stand out as formative influences on the young Richard Strauss: his father, Franz, a hornist of conservative tastes; Hans von Bülow, a former Liszt pupil and recovering Wagnerian who was frequently at loggerheads with Franz; and Alexander von Ritter, another Liszt student who retained his passion for the music of the future when Bülow abjured it. From his father Strauss acquired a deep and abiding love of the music of classical and early romantic eras. From Bülow, to whom he was an assistant for a few months in 1885, he learned much about the art and craft of conducting. From Ritter, Strauss received a passionate induction into the progressive ideas of Liszt, Wagner, and Schopenhauer, which led to the composition of his early tone poems and his first opera, Guntram. Even though Strauss would eventually distance himself creatively from their advice, each contributed significantly to his artistic development.

Germany’s musical heritage is remarkably rich, but much of German music history is associated with smaller towns rather than Berlin and other large cities. Meiningen and Weimar are but two examples. Meiningen’s Court Orchestra boasts an illustrious history. In 1867, the town hosted the first meeting of the General German Music Society (ADMV or Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein), founded a few years earlier by Franz Liszt and Franz Brendel to promote the cause of “new music.” It was in Meiningen that Hans von Bülow introduced the young Richard Strauss to orchestral conducting. Between 1889 and 1894, and in Weimar, Strauss consolidated his growing reputation as an orchestral leader and a controversial composer of “new music.”Until illness forced him to resign his position, Strauss conducted works by Cherubini, Haydn, Robert Schumann, and Smetana as well as portions of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and his own symphonic poem Don Juan.

This chapter explores the environment of programmatic music-making that centered on the so-called “progressive” composers Liszt, Wagner, and their acolytes, contextualizes the ongoing debates between absolute music and program music that they occasioned, and considers various programmatic compositions outside of that narrow tradition. It gives particular attention to the forty-year period between the appearance of most of Liszt’s symphonic poems and Strauss’s tone poems, in which Hans von Bronsart, Hans von Bülow, Alexander Ritter, Felix Draeseke, and other students of the New German School sought to develop tenets of program music with limited success. Just as integral to the success of program music were the sites and contexts of its performance, as Vienna, Paris, Madrid, and New York welcomed and rejected program music in equal measure. These circumstances shaped Strauss to be a composer open toward, but also healthily suspicious of, program music and its past practitioners.

For Richard Strauss, the orchestra was his primary medium of expression, and his use of orchestral forces mirrors the growth and expansion of that ensemble in the late nineteenth century. Strauss’s earliest works call for a traditional double-wind orchestra, which reflects the conservative teachings of his father, Franz Strauss, but by the late 1880s, Richard’s tone poems require triple-wind ensembles with more brass, due to the influences of the Wagnerian Alexander Ritter. Strauss’s experiences as a conductor in Meiningen, Weimar, and elsewhere revealed the limitations of undersized orchestras and the growing practice of reinforcing those ensembles with additional instrumentalists for Wagnerian repertoire, especially including Strauss’s own works. Strauss’s revision of Hector Berlioz’s Treatise on Instrumentation (1905) also appears to have inspired a new generation of composers, who quickly adopted the Wagnerian orchestra in the years immediately after the Treatise appeared.