Richard Strauss lived in Garmisch-Partenkirchen from 1908 until his death in 1949. A visit to his villa, which now serves as an archive, but thanks to the original interior it still looks incredibly lived in. Even the laundry is still neatly bundled in the cupboards.
Even the rehearsals for Richard Strauss’ first opera “Guntram” in 1894 did not go well. The orchestra in Weimar felt overwhelmed, the tenor too, and Pauline de Ahna, who sang Freihild, threw her notes at the conducting composer out of sheer tension. She married Strauss that same year, but unlike their marriage, “Guntram” was never a success. Not even when Strauss revised the opus decades later. At some point he got tired of it and “buried” the piece in the garden of his villa in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. A shrine still reminds of the honorable and virtuous Guntram, “who was cruelly killed by his own father’s symphonic orchestra.”