Lateness was the saving grace of Richard Strauss. With a dash of hyperbole one might even say it saved him from a fate “worse” than death, for it allowed him to avoid a postmortem reception history dominated by moral revulsion. Posterity has not always been kind to Strauss but it would have been a lot less so had he died, say, in 1934 when still president of the Reichsmusikkammer, or in the early 1940s when courting the Nazi functionaries Hans Frank and Baldur von Schirach while his son’s Jewish inlaws, the von Grabes, were being slaughtered in the death camps. After the end of the Second World War, Strauss reinvented himself, and his muse enjoyed a remarkable late flowering. He found a new publisher, new friends, new financial backers, and new markets while establishing, consciously or not, a satisfying aesthetic narrative for his oeuvre that served to underpin his rehabilitation.

This late burst of inspiration, his “Indian summer” as it is often termed, was soon seen by most commentators as an act of rejuvenation, a return to the innocent springs of youth. Capriccio, for some his operatic masterpiece, was followed by the Metamorphosen, three concertos, and works for wind ensemble. The narrative of his life closes with his “ultimate opus ultimum,” the Four Last Songs, whose apparent yea-saying acceptance of his approaching end gives them the unusual status of a work supposedly inspired by their composer’s acceptance of his own approaching death.

Willi Schuh was one of the first to draw parallels between the early and the late Strauss, writing in Tempo as early as December 1945 that “since Capriccio Strauss has written only smaller instrumental works of a classicism which points back to his beginnings sixty-five years ago.” Just about everyone since has followed his lead. Bryan Gilliam has remarked in the New Grove on how Strauss returned “to the classic genres of his youth” after Capriccio.