I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.

At the end of the war Strauss wrote in his private diary:

The most terrible period of human history is at an end the twelve year reign of bestiality ignorance and anti-culture under the greatest criminals during which Germany's 2000 years of cultural evolution met its doom. Death and legacy

Richard Strauss died at the age of 85 on 8 September 1949 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen Germany. With Hofmannsthal he created Ariadne auf Naxos (1912) Die Frau ohne Schatten (1918) Die ägyptische Helena (1927) and Arabella (1932).

Strauss along with Gustav Mahler represents the late flowering of German Romanticism after Richard Wagner in which pioneering subtleties of orchestration are combined with an advanced harmonic style. Richard Georg Strauss (11 June 1864 – 8 September 1949) was a leading German composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras.