ABSTRACT
Few composers can match the record of Richard Strauss, who visited England over a period of almost half a century, from 1897 to 1947. By the time of his first visit, when he was greeted by a gale, Strauss was already an established and successful conductor and composer. Three years before, in 1894, at the age of thirty, he had made his conducting début at Bayreuth after holding other posts in Munich and Berlin. He was already widely acclaimed for his tone poems Don Juan (1888), Tod und Verklärung (1890), Till Eulenspiegel (1894-5) and Also sprach Zarathustra (1896).
