Richard Strauss successful conducting and composing career spanned one of the most fascinating stretches of modern German history from oil lamps to atomic energy from a young empire to a divided Germany. This biography covers Strauss early musical development his emergence as a tone poet in the late nineteenth century his turn to the stage at the beginning of the twentieth century the successes and misfires of the post-World War I era the turbulent 1930s and the period of the Second World War and its aftermath.