From the time he wrote The Firebird (1909–10), Igor Stravinsky’s music achieved feats of compositional magic by combining musical recollection with innovation in a way that left each recognisable, yet inseparable from the other.1 Stravinsky’s works looked to the past by evoking established musical repertories and their conventions. In these same works, his frequently radical inventions created a groundbreaking musical present that motivated his own future and that of music more generally.

This chapter brings Strauss’s music into constructive dialogue with Hollywood film, via the persona of Erich Korngold. It examines Korngold’s historical connection with Strauss through the former composer’s operas and concert works, before exploring the ways in which Strauss can be heard in the film scores by Korngold and his contemporaries in the 1930s and 40s. The use of one particular Straussian harmonic trait – third-related triadic sequences (of both octatonic and hexatonic variety) – is highlighted in Korngold’s scores and traced in more recent film, including in the output of John Williams. Williams’s use of what Frank Lehman calls "chromatically modulating cadential resolutions" can also be found in Strauss and Korngold. The chapter concludes by suggesting that hearing Strauss in Korngold and Williams is just one way of constructing a Straussian Text, one that reveals the power of seeking to encounter Strauss’s music in varied and surprising contexts.