"Strauss, the new conductor, seemed a hopeless failure; he kept the band as smooth, and also inane, as a linen collar; and his tempi, except for the occasional gallop in the wrong place, were for the most part insufferably slow. We all sat wishing we had not come, and that Strauss had never been born."

"I have enjoyed most particularly reading the correspondence between Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. The genuine friendship, competitiveness and support that thread through their communications are life lessons for us all."

"When it comes to the music of Richard Strauss, the bowing makes the fiddler grouse."

"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 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!"

"German Music is unthinkable without Richard Strauss."

"Wagner's music is the most modern and the ultimate. Nobody is beyond that. Strauss's "Progress" is drivel."

"I can assure you sincerely: since Wagner we have not had such a great master as Strauss."

"The greatest impression he made on me: whatever he said or did, happened – with greatest ease. One never had the impression of being in front of a person who was aware of his own significance or who acted upon it. There was never any trace of vanity, as with many when faced with the fate of considering oneself above average."

"Here is another small indication of how Strauss saw himself primarily as a practising musician rather than as a big composer of his time – which he was. In the years leading up to the Second World War, when it was still not the fashion for famous people to give out their private telephone numbers, I would read for the first time in a Garmisch Telephone Book: Dr. Strauss, Richard, Kapellmeister, and not as one would suspect “Composer”."

"He would write out the full score from the short score with everything, even new counterpoints in ink in the final draft;...he never crossed anything out. If he made a mistake he would take out a pen-knife, carefully erase it, smooth the spot with his nail and write the note over the spot. But there were very few corrections to be done, for he rarely made a mistake. Even with transposing instruments, where it is easy to go wrong. He would write just as the likes of us write a letter."

"Once, he was sitting at his desk, with me behind him. He was working on the score of Daphne and discussing a Mozart interpretation with me. Upon which I said "But Herr Doktor, you can't talk to me about other things whilst you are working". He replied: "Don't worry, carry on my dear Böhm, I am able to think of the two things at once"."

"There was no more hard-working musician in Germany. Mahler was one of many to marvel at his energy, expressing open astonishment at Strauss's ability to produce such a wide-ranging body of music while, simultaneously, sustaining an opera house, an orchestra, conducting guest tours and a family."