The former head of Goebbels’s Chamber of Music, composer Richard Strauss, was perhaps too eminent to be disturbed by denazification proceedings; living quietly in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, he survived the war to produce a final sequence of limpid, Mozartian works that count among his best, from the Metamorphoses for string orchestra to the oboe concerto; he died in 1949 before he could hear the first performance of his final masterpiece, the Four Last Songs.266
