As a young composer, works of Wagner, Hector Berlioz, and Liszt were the ultimate source of his inspiration that helped to sharpen his own technique and imagination. By not following the traditional form, his style became identifiable as the grand, bravura, flexible, post-Romantic panoply that dominated audiences in the late 19th and early 20th centuries however his musical evolution was pursued in isolation, untouched by the progression and experiments going on around him. He spent the last 38 years of his life refining and polishing his style. The Mozartean sense was apparent in his later years. The opera Capriccio and other late works achieved a perfect fusion of the late German Romantic and the Neoclassical approach.

DON JUAN; OP. 20:

In 1889 a successful performance of Don Juan made 24 year old Richard Strauss a superstar in Weimar. This work redefined the parameters of musical possibility by illustrating orchestral dynamism with such colourful boldness. He began his career composing music indebted to some of literature’s greatest characters so this work was influenced by an incomplete play by the Austrian poet Nikolaus Lenau. It is believed that the seeds for Strauss’s Don Juan were planted as early as 1885, when he attended a performance: Don Juans Ende by Paul Heyse. He …show more content…
A character is remarkably presented in a few sharp musical gestures. He managed to conquer the world’s concert halls. The figure of Don Juan is unimaginable without the passionate horn theme like Richard Wagner’s. Così fan tutte and Tristan and Isolde were his favourite pieces full of undying love. Coincidently, at the time he was composing this tone poem he fell madly in love with Pauline de Ahna, the soprano singer: his future wife. At the earliest performances Strauss had printed three excerpts from Lenau’s poem in the program note but later on, he disdained such self-help guides and let the music to speak for