"I have met a great many artists in my life but never one who knew how to maintain such abstract and unerring objectivity towards himself. Thus Strauss frankly admitted to me in the first hour of our meeting that he well knew, that at seventy the composer’s musical inspiration no longer possesses its pristine power. He could hardly succeed in composing works like Till Eulenspiegel or Death and Transfiguration because just pure music requires an extreme measure of creative freshness. But the World could still inspire him!"

"Work, as he practised it, was quite a remarkable procedure with Strauss. Nothing of the daemonic, nothing of the artist’s mad exaltation, nothing of those depressions and desperations we know from accounts of Beethoven and Wagner. Strauss works to the point and composes like Johann Sebastian Bach, like all those sublime craftsmen of their art, quietly and systematically. At nine in the morning he sits down to resume his work just where he left off the day before, always writing the first sketch of his composition in pencil, the piano score in ink, and continues thus without pause until twelve or one o’clock. In the afternoon he plays Skat, a German card game, transfers two or three pages to the final score and possibly conducts an opera in the evening. He does not know what nervousness is, by day and night his artistic mind is equally alert and lucid. When his valet knocks on the door to bring his evening clothes, he gets up from his work, dresses, rides to the theatre and conducts with the same assurance and calm with which he plays Skat in the afternoon, and the next morning inspiration again falls into its proper place."

"I want to pick the old man's brains for my opera."

"Strauss played some from memory. He’s not a good by-heart player, and something extraordinary happened with ‘All mein Gedanken’. Already after the third bar he couldn’t remember the accompaniment anymore and composed an entirely new song. I leapt along with him, the words fitted perfectly, no one in the audience suspected a thing, and when we had made it to the end I turned my eyes to the right to see what his reaction was. All I saw was him grinning from ear to ear—it was really difficult for me to find the calm and seriousness needed for the next song, ‘Freundliche Vision’. After the group we couldn’t stop laughing in the artists’ room, and I asked him to write down the new ‘All mein Gedanken’ straightaway afterwards, but he replied ‘Oh, I’ve already completely forgotten it.’ What a pity! I liked it much more than the original."

"Even if he has many hard sides to him and often appears cold, in the seven weeks of our tour I have come to recognise him as one of the noblest of men. Every hour spent with him is gain, even when he is silent."

"He asked about Vienna and the Opera, listened with great interest, grumbled about the Italian dress rehearsals. He thought opera in German-speaking countries should be performed in German."

"I was aroused as by a flash of lightning by the first Budapest performance of Also Sprach Zarathustra. It contained the seeds for a new life. I started composing again."

"Salome and Pelléas et Mélisande are the most striking works in European music for the last fifteen years."

"Except for Strauss, there are none but second class composers in Germany."

"Richard Strauss has neither a foolish wild curly mane, nor the movements of a madman. He is tall and in his free, resolute attitude he looks like one of those great explorers who, with a smile on their faces, cross the territory of savage peoples. Doesn't one need something of this attitude in order to be able to shake the well-mannered public?"

"He definiteley thinks in colored images. Ein Heldenleben is a book of images, cinematography even."

"I can assure you, that the sun shines in Richard Strauss's music. It is impossible to resist the overwhelming power of this man!"

"He is one of those musicians about whom it is difficult to write impartially or objectively, as his music is likely to arouse antipathy or admiration according to the temperamental outlook of the individual critic."

"When all is said and done, he was a giant - even if his feet were made of clay."

"His music stirs me to my very depths. To me the finale is a flood of strength and joy. One always wonders how that could have come out of this. There has been nothing like it in symphonic music since Beethoven."

"He conducts with his whole body - arms, head and behind together. At moments he seems to dance on his knees; he crouches down; he makes tense and pulsating movements, like electric vibrations, with his hands. He gives explanations in very bad French, and sings out of tune passages that he wants played again; he cares nothing for ridicule; he always looks bored, sulky half asleep - but nevertheless lets nothing escape him."

"While conducting an orchestra he breaks into a frantic dance which follows the slightest details of his quivering music like clear water into which a stone has just fallen."

"Richard Strauss is at the same time a poet and a musician."

"You are really the only one of all my colleagues who takes any notice of my works."

"I simply must tell you of the thrilling impression the work (Salome) made on me when I read through it recently. Every note is spot on! Your vocation is to be dramatist. Through your music you have made me understand for the first time what Wilde's work is about"

"I labour on with countless rehearsals. He makes do with just a few, and it always sounds right."

"Salome again made an extraordinary impression on me. It is entirely a work of genius, very powerful and decidedly one of the most important things that our age has produced."

"No other composer equals Strauss in his power of writing long stretches of music that interests us in and for itself, at the same time that every line and colour in it seems to express some new trait of the individual who is being sketched."

"Richard Strauss is a brilliant pig - I can find no other word for it. The whole thing is larded with illogical, unnecessary and hideous discord."

"Richard Strauss? An old Oyster!"

"I watched him at rehearsals and admired the way he conducted. Every corrective remark he made was exact: his ears and his musicianship were impregnable."

"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."

"I believe that he (Strauss) will remain one of the characteristic and outstanding figures in musical history. Works like Salome, Elektra and Intermezzo, and others will not perish."

"I was never revolutionary. The only revolutionary in our time was Strauss!"

"I ask myself why I have actually survived once more and been called back to life."

"Please start from the Bruch violin concerto again!"

"Strauss told me about his new ballet, which he wrote in the summer. It’s called ‘Schlagobers’ (whipped cream) and he said, jokingly: ‘Oh yes, when one gets old one has ideas like that.’"

"It is difficult composing endings. Beethoven and Wagner could do it. Only great composers can do it. I can do it too."

"Long live the politico-satrical-parodistic opera!"

"Man (in B major) asks: When? When? Nature, (in C Major) answers from the depths Never, never, never will the weather improve"."

"Declarations about war and politics are not fitting for an artist, who must give his attention to his creations and his works."

"More like a sacrilege du printemps."

"Very fine, but why do you put so many wrong notes in? Basically, it is all built on simple triads."

"It is clear to me that the German nation will achieve new creative energy only by liberating itself from Christianity"

"I hope, most revered Maestro, that these metronome markings, in my opinion wholly unneeded by you, are specific enough. Where they do not fit with your conception, I implore you urgently just to ignore them."

"Thirty years ago I was regarded as a rebel, but to-day, as you see, I have lived to find myself a classic."

"Why don't people see what is new in my work, how in them, as is found only in Beethoven, the human being visibly plays a part in the work."

"I am not one to compose long melodies as did Mozart. I can’t get beyond short themes. But what I can do, is utilize such a theme, paraphrase it and extract everything that is in it, and I don’t think there’s anybody today who can match me in that."

"Anybody who wants to be a real musician must be able to set a menu to music."

"My wife, my child, my music, Nature and the sun; they are my happiness."

"In my opinion, Gustav Mahler's work is one of the most important and interesting products in the history of modern creative arts."

"As for the Rosenkavalier waltzes...how could I have done those without a thought of the laughing genius of Vienna?"

"Of all god-gifted dispensers of joy, Johann Strauss is to me the most endearing. I willingly admit to having sometimes conducted the Perpetuum Mobile with far more pleasure than many a four movement symphony."

"The melodic idea which suddenly falls upon me out of the blue appears in the imagination immediately, unconsciously, uninfluenced by reason. It is the greatest gift of the divinity and cannot be compared with anything else."

"Mozart's melodies, Beethoven's symphonies, Schubert's songs, acts two and three of Tristan are symbols in which are revealed the most profound spiritual truths. They are not "invented", but are "given in their dreams"to those privileged to receive them. Whence they come no one knows, not even their creator, the unconscious mouthpiece of the demiurge."