Richard Strauss’s last stage work is something of a curiosity. It has no action, no development, almost no plot, and none of the intricate characterization of the earlier operas. Capriccio is described as a ‘conversation piece for music in one act’. It was something of a self-indulgence for the ageing Strauss—a long consideration of the relative merit of words and music, a subject to which composers since Monteverdi had given much time and thought. Capriccio was written during 1940/41, to a libretto by Strauss’s friend the conductor Clemens Krauss, and first performed in Munich in October 1942, though the Sextet had been given privately some months before.