Dresden, the capital city of the Kingdom of Saxony since 1806, was intimately connected with Wagner’s childhood and his early professional life as Royal court Kapellmeister from 1843 to 1849. The locale is thus both a key site of early life impressions and the site of the composer’s most critical period of creative development, from the premiere of Der fliegende Holländer up to the first conceptual stages of Der Ring des Nibelungen tetralogy. The shared post of Hofkapellmeister involved continual negotiations between a musical-theatrical ancien régime and Wagner’s developing vision of a radical new aesthetic-social order manifested in his own operas, writings and utopian ideals. Wagner’s programming of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at key junctures during the later period of his Kapellmeistership and the burning of the ‘old’ (Pöppelmann) court theatre during the May 1849 insurrection are read as symbolic of a key transition in Wagner’s life and artistic career.

Strauss’s successful tenure in Berlin (1898–1918) is closely tied to the cultural environment of the German capital, where the local artistic sphere provided ideas, contacts, and opportunities that enabled him to develop professionally. This chapter explores the rise of Berlin during the nineteenth century as a key urban center, while documenting the city’s cultural panorama. It discusses the city’s most important musical institutions and summarizes characteristic aspects of its musical life, examining Strauss’s role in the broader art scene through his personal links and institutional affiliations. As modernist tendencies at the turn of the century conflicted with traditional ideals, Strauss emerged as a figure who, as a servant of the court but also a modernist, was able to reconcile these conflicting views.

Richard Strauss’s death on September 8, 1949 marked the end of an era. With his passing, the dominance of the conductor-composer was no more. With his great contemporaries, Gustav Mahler and Felix Weingartner, Strauss helped to shape the musical landscape of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to pave the way for subsequent generations of conductors to build on their interpretative reforms and performance practices. This chapter investigates the ways in which Strauss interacted professionally with conducting colleagues, their early training, their rise through the ranks of the music profession, their approaches to programming, their management of orchestral musicians and singers (within both the rehearsal and performance environments), their physical gestures on the podium, their fee structures, and their interpretative practices when realizing works from the Central-European Canon.