"Richard Strauss dominated classical music at the turn of the 20th century with a series of works that pushed post-Romanticism to extremes and pre-empted the innovations of modernism. He, however, never embraced atonality, and was ultimately a pragmatist for whom subject matter always dictated style and harmonic language. One of the greatest of all opera composers: few have quite so profoundly understood the expressive power of the human voice or written for it so superbly." - Tim Ashley (The Guardian)