Autograph musical manuscript. Die Liebe der Danae, op. 83. 88 measures in condensed score. A draft of Strauss's opera. Signed in full and inscribed to fellow composer Eugene Zador

Folio (350 x 270 mm; 13.8" x 10.65").

88 measures in condensed score notated on 2 pp. of a single leaf in pencil on 32-stave music paper. Most likely dating from 1939 or 1940, during which time Strauss was composing the work in the Swiss town of Baden and in Garmisch in Germany.

With an autograph inscription in ink signed in full: "Dr Èugen Zador zur Erinnerung an der 22 Nov. 1946 ... ergeben Dr. Richard Strauss, Baden."

A working manuscript with a number of corrections and alterations; one measure extending into margin. With music close to the end of Act III of the opera, from performance number 114-122 (pp. 310-315 in the first edition piano-vocal score of 1944). The characters Jupiter (baritone) and Danae (soprano) are singing, commencing with Jupiter's "Nah das Ange! Nah der Arm and Danae's "So bleibe der Ferne bei sei-nem Glanze."

The music in this manuscript draft differs significantly from that found in the published score. Trenner 278. Mueller von Asow p. 1015.

Die Liebe der Danae, an opera in three acts to a libretto by Joseph Gregor based on Hugo Hofmannsthal's Danae, was first performed in Salzburg at the Festspielhaus on August 14, 1952 (it had been mounted in full public dress rehearsal earlier, on 16 August 1944, but the performance was subsequently cancelled).

"Musically, Die Liebe der Danae is without doubt an anthology of Strauss's familiar modes, but it offers much more than self-repetition. None of his other three post-Hofmannsthal operas had given full scope to his best strengths: in Die schweigsame Frau he overestimated his knack for closed-form numbers, the narrow dramatic terms of Friedenstag cramped him, the Freudian-pastoral Daphne was slightly bloodless. Gregor, like a liberal sweet-seller, gave the Great Composer everything he wanted for his Danae 'swansong'. If the resultant theatrical mishmash sets knotty problems for a director (not least the disproportionate length of Act 3), it allowed Strauss to weave his intricate thematic webs again, to devise vocal flights of every kind and to make his orchestra glow - in a new vein of seasoned maturity, weary but infinitely experienced and resourceful. Capriccio, his real operatic swansong, would be far more elegantly consistent; Danae is our last glimpse of the old unconfined Strauss, prodigal with importunate feeling." David Murray in Grove Music Online

"By comparison with the other late operas of Strauss we must specially admire the extraordinarily inventive and skilful thematic treatment in Danae ... Of the orchestral colouring which so pleased the composer, we may remark that its glow and variety retain something of the hard bright incandescence which were noticed in Die Ägyptische Helena and the Apollonian scenes from Daphne; the generous warmth of Der Rosenkavalier and Ariadne are missing. But this is not to say that Danae is heartless or cold in its music; the final orchestral Interlude must effectively declare the opposite. It is simply that times change, and Strauss at seventy-five was a different artist from Strauss at fifty." Mann: Richard Strauss: A critical study of the operas, pp. 357-358.

Zador (1894-1977), an American composer of Hungarian birth, "studied with Heuberger at the Vienna Music Academy (1911), with Reger in Leipzig (1912-14) and with Volbach at Münster University (1920-21). From 1921 he taught at the Vienna City Conservatory, and in 1934 became an honorary teacher at the Liszt Academy of Music, Budapest. He left Hungary in 1939 and finally settled in Hollywood, where he orchestrated more than 120 film scores. Apart from these, the bulk of his output consists of stage works and orchestral pieces, among them the popular Hungarian Caprice." János Demény, revised by Michael Meckna in Grove Music Online.