The cosmic fanfare from 2001: A Space Odyssey was written in 1896 by a composer whose real life was darker than any film. This deep dive follows Richard Strauss from a Munich childhood under his father Franz, a court horn player who treated Wagner as cultural poison, through the teenage smuggling of a Tristan score, blunt criticism from Brahms, and the 1885 encounter with Alexander Ritter and Schopenhauer that pushed him toward the tone poem.

The episode covers his marriage to the volatile soprano Pauline de Ahna, the scandal and wealth of Salome in 1905, the dissonance of Elektra, and the apparent retreat of Der Rosenkavalier in 1911. It then confronts his presidency of the Reichsmusikkammer, his Jewish daughter-in-law Alice and grandsons, the intercepted letter to Stefan Zweig that ended his post, and the creative resurgence of Metamorphosen and the Four Last Songs amid the ruins.

• How the tone poem turns the orchestra into a cast of characters, from bleating sheep in Don Quixote to a dying man’s breath
• Goebbels’s private diary contempt for the composer whose name gave the regime cultural legitimacy
• Being turned away at the gates of Theresienstadt while pleading for a relative; 26 of his in-laws were murdered in the camps
• The American lieutenant who recognized his name in 1945 and the soldier-oboist who inspired a new concerto
• The Four Last Songs quoting Death and Transfiguration, written over 60 years earlier, and his 1948 denazification ruling