Not long ago, the idea of devoting an essay to Richard Strauss's influence on twentieth-century composition might have seemed absurd. From around 1918 onwards, the erstwhile “leader of the moderns” and “chief of the avant-garde” was widely ridiculed as a Romantic relic, whose undoubted native talent had been tainted by poor taste or unprincipled commercialism. Charles Ives identified Strauss with “the comfort of a woman who takes more pleasure in the fit of fashionable clothes than in a healthy body.” Aaron Copland described Strauss's tone poems as “the offspring of an exhausted parentage … the final manifestation of a dying world.” Igor Stravinsky, in conversation with Robert Craft in the late 1950s, issued an incomparably withering putdown: “I would like to admit all Strauss operas to whichever purgatory punishes triumphant banality. Their musical substance is cheap and poor; it cannot interest a musician today.” Stravinsky went on: “I am glad that young musicians today have come to appreciate the lyric gift in the songs of the composer Strauss despised, and who is more significant in our music than he is: Gustav Mahler.” Strauss in no way despised Mahler, but the point holds. Composers at various points on the stylistic spectrum, from Copland and Britten to Boulez and Berio, hailed Mahler, not Strauss, as the fin-de-siècle prophet of modernity.