Strauss met the composer Alexander Ritter who was a violinist in the Meiningen orchestra, Ritter had a tremendous impact on the trajectory of Strauss’s work as a composer from 1885 onward. Ritter convinced Strauss to abandon his more conservative style of composing and embrace the “music of the future” by modelling his compositional style on Wagner and Liszt. All of this together gave a new aesthetic anchor to Strauss which first became evident in his embrace of the tone poem genre. In 1886, after leaving his post in Meiningen, Strauss spent several weeks traveling throughout Italy before assuming a new post as third conductor at the Bavarian State Opera. Strauss’s tenure at the Bavarian State Opera was not a happy one. 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. During the summer of 1889 as the assistant conductor of the Bayreuth Festival he befriended Cosima Wagner who became a long-term close friend. The soprano, Pauline De Ahna went with Strauss to Weimar and he later married her on 10 September 1894. She was a great source of inspiration to him. Throughout his life, from his earliest songs to the final Four Last Songs of 1948, he preferred the soprano voice to all others, and all his operas contain important soprano roles. In Weimar Strauss’s first opera, Guntram, in 1894 was received with mixed reviews and was Strauss’s first major failure.

In spite of the failure of his first opera, Strauss’s tenure in Weimar brought about several important successes for his career. His tone poem Don Juan premiered in Weimar in 1889 to tremendous critical response, and the work quickly brought him international fame and success. This was followed by another lauded achievement, the premiere of his tone poem Death and Transfiguration in 1890. Both of these works, along with the earlier Burleske, became internationally known and established him as a leading modernist composer. He also had much success as a conductor in Weimar. Strauss left his post in Weimar when he was appointed Kapellmeister, or first conductor, of the Bavarian State Opera where he became responsible for the operas of Wagner. 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). He also served as principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic in 1894–1895. In 1897, the Strausses’ only child, their son Franz, was born. Strauss left the Bavarian State Opera in 1898 when he became principal conductor of the Staatskapelle Berlin at the Berlin State Opera in the fall of 1898; a position he remained in for 15 years. By this time in his career, he was in constant demand as a guest conductor internationally and enjoyed celebrity status as a conductor. In 1904 Strauss embarked on his first North American tour. During this trip he was working intensively on composing his third opera, Salome, based on Oscar Wilde’s 1891 play Salomé. The work, which premiered in Dresden in 1905, became Strauss’s greatest triumph in his career up to that point, and opera houses all over the world quickly began programming the opera. After Salome, Strauss had a string of critically successful operas which he created with the librettist and poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal. His opera Der Rosenkavalier is generally considered his finest achievement. During this time he continued to work internationally as a celebrity conductor, and from 1919 to 1924 he was principal conductor of the Vienna State Opera. In March 1933, when Strauss was 68, Adolf Hitler rose to power. Strauss never joined the Nazi party; 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 addition, to his determination to preserve and conduct the music of banned composers such as Gustav Mahler and Claude Debussy, Strauss’s need to protect his Jewish daughter-in-law and Jewish grandchildren also motivated his behaviour. Strauss completed the composition of Metamorphosen, a work for 23 solo strings, in 1945. The title and inspiration for the work comes from a profoundly self-examining poem by Goethe, which Strauss had considered setting as a choral work. Generally regarded as one of the masterpieces of the string repertoire, Metamorphosen contains Strauss’s most sustained outpouring of tragic emotion. Strauss had a late creative upsurge from 1942 to the end of his life. The events of World War II seemed to bring the composer – who had grown old, tired, and a little jaded – into focus. The major works of the last years of Strauss’s life, written in his late 70s and 80s, include, among others, his Horn Concerto No. 2, Metamorphosen, his Oboe Concerto, his Duet concertino for clarinet and bassoon, and his Four Last Songs. At the end of the war Strauss’s bank accounts were frozen, and many of his assets seized by American forces. 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 trip was a critical success and provided him and his wife with some much-needed money. From May to September 1948, just before his death, Strauss composed the Four Last Songs, which deal with the subject of dying. In December 1948, Strauss was hospitalized for several weeks after undergoing bladder surgery. His health rapidly deteriorated after that. On 15 August, he suffered a heart attack and he quietly died of kidney failure in his sleep