Over three sections, a conclusion, and five appendices running to almost one hundred pages, Holden sets out the details of Strauss’s career, his championing of particular works, his approach to the conducting and staging of individual operas, and his position in German musical and cultural life. The book is not structured along strictly chronological lines, as the author notes:

Parts 1 and 2 chronicle sequentially his activities from his earliest years to the end of his Vienna period, while Part 3 documents his activities as a guest conductor from near the beginning of his career to his last public engagement.

Such re-tracking may seem a touch repetitious, but the author ensures that the reader’s attention is always on the issues relevant to the various stages in Strauss’s career. Introducing each chapter are well-chosen photographs of Strauss, mostly with baton in hand. Unfortunately for the reader interested in context, they are mostly uncredited and unsourced. A notable exception is the shot from 1936 of the composer conducting the Olympic Hymn at the Olympic Games in Berlin: one looks in vain, however, for any comment on this particular performance and on the wider cultural-political questions it might raise in the reader’s, let alone the author’s, mind. More on that specific – and vexed – issue later.

Among the most instructive sections of Holden’s study are those dealing with Strauss’s advocacy of Mozart’s operas, and his approach to realising these in performance. Here, Holden’s research is exemplary: to modern-day audiences, it is almost incomprehensible that, as he points out, ‘at the Paris Opera … Mozart’s operas were all but ignored during the late nineteenth century’, while, in Cologne, the situation was similar. On the other hand, Covent Garden ‘mounted ninety-six performances of them between 1886 and 1914’. Set these details beside the fact that ‘during the same period, Strauss conducted 234 performances … the vast majority of which were at Munich and Berlin’, and one gets a sense of just how committed the composer was to his great predecessor’s stage works, and what importance he attached to the task of introducing them to, and keeping them before, an audience.

While the opera Strauss most often conducted was Don Giovanni, he was also the first major conductor to champion Così fan tutte – a work which did not feature in Covent Garden’s repertoire until 1968. In his examination of Strauss’s exploration of Don Giovanni, Holden has also gone back to the conductor’s working scores, and to his close collaboration with the producer–actor Ernst von Possart. (Appendix 2 presents extracts from the latter’s notes on the opera, which should be required reading, even now, for any director approaching the work.)

More problematic, however, was his new adaptation (not, as Holden wrongly translates, ‘edition’) of Idomeneo, where, along with his transformation of secco recitatives into accompanied ones, he even rejigs characters and changes voices from tenor to bass (in the case of The High Priest) and from tenor to baritone (in the case of ‘Arbaces’ [sic]). Holden’s teasing out of the complicated issues of authenticity versus theatrical effectiveness acknowledges both the merits and flaws of Strauss’s approach. On the one hand is Alfred Einstein’s view that the version is ‘a gross act of mutilation’ and that, for another, the music is like ‘Mozart with whipped cream’; on the other, the argument that ‘Strauss does not try to disguise himself as Mozart’, and that the version has played an important role in reclaiming the work for subsequent audiences.

In these Mozartian enterprises, Strauss was both practising composer and conductor. The other instructive aspect of Holden’s study is his outlining of Strauss’s conducting style and of the way his performances were received both at the time and subsequently. Here, Holden offers a range of contemporary comments from reviewers that allow the reader to form, in so far as is possible, a recognisable picture of Strauss on the podium. At one extreme is Gustav Kobbé, who, in 1904, comparing Strauss’s approach to his own tone poems with his reading of Mozart’s Jupiter, observed that

Strauss read the Mozart symphony neatly. But the sound he evoked … made one think of a man who, after finishing a set of exercises with Indian clubs, goes through them with toothpicks … One point about it was worth noticing. Strauss looked less frequently at the score than when he is leading one of his own works …

Holden correctly devotes considerable space to the role played by Hans von Bülow in Strauss’s career as a conductor, but, in a surprising error, ascribes a piece of epigrammatic advice to the older man which he has simply misread. Holden reproduces a photograph of Strauss, baton in hand, with a handwritten inscription. Holden translates this as ‘“If you don’t have the score in your head, put your head in the score” (Hans von Bülow’s advice to Strauss.)’ What the German actually says – much wittier, and more appropriate to what Strauss is doing in the photograph – is ‘If you don’t have the score in your head, then your head will be stuck in the score.’ This relates directly to what Kobbé had observed, and to Strauss’s own demeanour, where his manner on the podium often seemed casual to the point of nonchalance.

Unfortunately, this nonchalance also found its equivalent – and here I return to an issue adumbrated earlier – in Strauss’s attitude to other matters relevant to his position in German musical life. It seems extraordinary in a study examining Strauss’s career that only six pages are devoted to his problematic role during the Nazi period. There is insufficient space in this review to even begin to examine Holden’s approach to this unexamined life. But his lengthy bibliography, while it lists eleven of his own publications, finds no space for any of the major studies of music in the Third Reich: no Michael Kater, no Josef Wulf, no Ernst Levi. Whether this is meant to reflect the subject’s or the author’s own somewhat blinkered view of the relationship between art and politics is hard to decide.

To be sure, Strauss had to tread a cautious path in dealing with the authorities, given the Jewish connection in his family. But one does not need to operate with a rigidly post-Holocaust set of ethical guidelines to find remarks such as the following, quoted by Holden without comment, as at best ignorant, at worst, symptomatic of something more disturbing: ‘Gustav Mahler died on 19 May … The Jew Mahler could still be uplifted by Christianity’; or the aside in a letter to his Jewish collaborator Stefan Zweig, seeking to exculpate himself: ‘Because I have conducted a concert in place of that greasy rascal Bruno Walter.’

The implications of such remarks are surely too obvious to be ignored by any scholar considering Strauss’s ambivalent role in the Third Reich, especially when set beside others such as ‘The Jew does not understand Wagner’s music’ (Joseph Goebbels), and the characterisation of Hitler as ‘the great architect of German social life’ – not Goebbels this time, but Richard Strauss.