An outstanding German Romantic composer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His symphonic poems of the 1890's and his operas of the following decade have remained an indispensable feature of the standard repertoire throughout the 20th century.

As a young composer, Strauss came under the influence of Wagner, Hector Berlioz, and Liszt just when his technique and imagination were sharpened to make the most of their impact. From the tone poem Aus Italien onward, his style became recognisable as the big, bravura, flexible, post-Romantic panoply that dominated audiences in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But, having achieved fame as an avant-garde composer, Strauss after Der Rosenkavalier became a conservative whose musical evolution was pursued in isolation, unaffected by the advances and experiments going on around him.

He spent the last 38 years of his life refining and polishing his style, writing often for smaller orchestras, partly out of practical considerations (to ensure the audibility of sung words in the theatre) and partly because large-scale Romantic musical textures were becoming less and less significant. In later years Strauss's style became more classical in the Mozartean sense. Indeed, the opera Capriccio and other late works may be said to have achieved a perfect fusion of the late German Romantic and the Neo-classical manner.