Strauss's Autumn Glory

With Capriccio – completed in August 1941 although not performed until October 1942 – Strauss told his friend and biographer-elect, the Swiss critic Willi Schuh, ‘my life's work is at an end’. It was an exaggeration, true only so far as his operatic work was concerned. Strauss could not live unless he had some work to occupy him, and in the dark days of 1942, when he was living partly in Garmisch and partly in Vienna and knew himself at the age of 78 to be under surveillance by the Nazi régime, he needed the solace of work more than ever. He diverted himself after Capriccio with the idea of a tone-poem with choral finale about the Danube as a centenary offering to the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. He filled four note-books with sketches for Die Danau, but he was unable to work up much enthusiasm for it. As he told the orchestra, ‘feeling does not turn itself into melodies as quickly as it did with the great old masters’. He told them he would finish it one day, but he never worked on it again.