This chapter surveys the wide range of spiritual and philosophical ideas that influenced Strauss during the emergence of his famously idiosyncratic worldview. Already a “freethinker” in his youth, and a product of an “alt-katholisch” household that rejected central Catholic doctrine, Strauss settled into a comfortable atheism while still in his teens. This skeptical disposition provided the backdrop for his encounters with 1) the fundamentalist Wagnerian metaphysics of his mentor, Alexander Ritter, and Wagner’s powerful and cultured widow Cosima; 2) Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1818, 1844), which he studied carefully on his own; 3) the later, anti-Wagnerian writings of Nietzsche (most famously Also sprach Zarathustra), which had a powerful effect on Strauss’s tone poems beginning with Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche (1895); and 4) the artistic and intellectual legacy of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, his lodestar, whose devotion to classical culture, and break from Romanticism, were paralleled by Strauss’s own.

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.

Of the German-language operas composed between Wagner’s Parsifal (1882) and Richard Strauss’s Salome (1905), only Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel (1893) has survived. This chapter surveys the mostly forgotten works that form the context of Strauss’s early operas. In addition to his musical style, Wagner’s concept of redemption through love and reception of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics exerted a powerful influence on the next generation, as seen in music dramas by Max von Schillings (Ingwelde), Pfitzner (Der arme Heinrich), and Strauss (Guntram). The new genre of fairy tale opera (Märchenoper) often presented lighter versions of Wagnerian style and ideology, such as in Hänsel und Gretel, Alexander Ritter’s Der faule Hans, and Siegfried Wagner’s Der Bärenhäuter. Even comic opera was strongly influenced, bifurcating into Meistersinger spinoffs (Schillings’s Der Pfeifertag) and harmless bourgeois idylls (Eugen d’Albert’s Die Abreise). Verismo-influenced hybrids include d’Albert’s Tiefland and Wilhelm Kienzl’s Der Evangelimann. Strauss’s Salome represented an act of liberation.

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.

Strauss engaged in close friendships only with two people over a long time: Ludwig Thuille and Friedrich Rösch. Even with Hofmannsthal there was an artistic collaboration but never a true friendship. Thuille influenced the young Strauss as a composer of instrumental music and a professor of counterpoint and harmony, and he encouraged Strauss on his way to the modern tone poem and opera. Rösch impressed Strauss as a musician and conductor, as an expert in the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and as a legal expert. Strauss also prized Rösch’s analytical and value judgments. In the beginnings of the General German Music Society and the Institution for Musical Performing Rights Strauss was the frontman but Rösch the worker.