In 1886, Strauss became one of the conductors of the Munich Opera, and three years later he went to the Weimar Opera as assistant conductor. It was in Weimar that he conducted the first performance of his tone poem, Don Juan (1889).
The symphonic poem —or tone poem as Strauss preferred to call it—was a genre made popular by Liszt. It is a symphonic piece of music based on a poetic idea. Strauss's tone poems became the culmination of the...