Throughout his creative life, Richard Strauss remained indebted to the music +Y7of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Mozart’s presence articulated itself in manifold ways through traces lost, hidden and unsettling. The first category is represented through Strauss’s cadenza for Mozart’s Piano concerto in c minor, K.491, performed at his debut in Meiningen. A hidden portrayal of Mozart is revealed in the character of the Composer in Ariadne auf Naxos, which the librettist Hofmannsthal had modelled after Beethoven. The final section turns to the surprising and unsettling appearance of Mozart’s music in Strauss’s scores, focussing on quotations and allusions in Die schweigsame Frau, the orchestral song Die Liebe (from the Drei Hymnen von Friedrich Hölderin für hohe Singstimme) and the ballet Schlagobers.
