Strauss’s one-act opera Capriccio comes from the final period of the composer’s life, which saw him move away from the large orchestras he had used hitherto into a sound world characterised by the use of more compact, refined music written for more chamber-like forces. It was a time clouded by war, but it was to bring forth a clutch of masterpieces, including the Second Horn Concerto, the symphonic poem Metamorphosen and the splendidly blithe Oboe Concerto.  

Strauss was 75 and living in the Bavarian resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen when World War II began. He was in the middle of writing his opera Die Liebe der Danae, which marked his farewell to large-scale, opulently scored operas. For his next and last stage project, he chose a libretto by the conductor Clemens Kraus, which turned on the relative merits of words versus music, personified as the rivalry between a poet and a musician for the love of a young widowed countess. This project was Capriccio, which occupied Strauss during 1940-41. Capriccio was subtitled a ‘conversation piece’, and is Strauss’s most intimate score; despite the intellectual nature of the subject, the music is elegant, translucent and utterly beautiful.  

This string sextet acts as the overture or prelude to the opera and is played as the curtain rises, revealing the scene of the salon in a chateau near Paris in pre-Revolutionary France. The players are rehearsing the music that the musician Framand has written to celebrate the birthday of the young Countess Madeleine. The music is totally romantic in feeling, beginning serenely and building in intensity to a passionate climax, before subsiding once more into tranquility.