Hitler later told Strauss's son that he had borrowed money from relatives to make the trip. Among them may have been the seventeen-year-old Adolf Hitler, who had just seen Mahler conduct Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde in Vienna. Ordinary music enthusiasts filled out the crowd-'young people from Vienna, with only the vocal score as hand luggage,' Richard Strauss noted.

The widow of Johann Strauss II, composer of On the Beautiful Blue Danube, represented old Vienna. One of them, Alban Berg, traveled with an older friend, who later recalled the 'feverish impatience and boundless excitement' that all felt as the evening approached. The bold young composer Arnold Schoenberg arrived from Vienna with his brother-in-law Alexander Zemlinsky and no fewer than six of his pupils. Gustav Mahler, the director of the Vienna Opera, attended with his wife, the beautiful and controversial Alma. Giacomo Puccini, the creator of La Bohème and Tosca, made a trip north to hear what 'terribly cacophonous thing' his German rival had concocted. The premiere of Salome had taken place in Dresden five months earlier, and word had got out that Strauss had created something beyond the pale-an ultra-dissonant biblical spectacle, based on a play by an Irish degenerate whose name was not mentioned in polite company, a work so frightful in its depiction of adolescent lust that imperial censors had banned it from the Court Opera in Vienna. When Richard Strauss conducted his opera Salome on May 16, 1906, in the Austrian city of Graz, several crowned heads of European music gathered to witness the event. I am ready, I feel free To cleave the ether on a novel flight, To novel spheres of pure activity.

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