“Bülow, who was very fond of my father,” says Strauss, “interested himself in me, and I have much to thank him for. He started me on my conducting career. My first experience of standing before an orchestra was in connection with the performance of a suite, in four movements, for wind instruments, which I had composed at his request. It is still in manuscript. Bülow made me conduct it without any rehearsal!” This must be the grand suite in B flat, misleadingly numbered opus 14—the same opus number as the Sturmlied. It is scored for thirteen wind instruments, and has been heard in London. The introduction and entire fourth movement are said to be the best. It is early Strauss. Strauss became music director in Meiningen, October, 1885, conducted his own F minor symphony and also made his début as pianist in Mozart’s C minor concerto. Von Bülow honored him by conducting the concerto. Strauss had already come under the influence of Alexander Ritter (1833-1896), a violinist in the Munich Orchestra who had married a niece of Wagner’s. Ritter, like von Bülow, was a man of strong magnetic personality, and both were warm-blooded Wagnerians and Lisztians. As boys they listened to that wonderful performance of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony given by Wagner at Dresden in 1849, and the two young gentlemen schoolfellows used to doff their caps every time they passed the master’s windows in the Ostra-Allee. “Ritter was exceptionally well read in all the philosophers, ancient and modern, and a man of the highest culture. His influence,” says Strauss, “was in the nature of a storm-wind. He urged me on to the development of the poetic, the expressive, in music, as exemplified in the works of Liszt, Wagner, and Berlioz. My symphonic fantasia, Aus Italien, is the connecting link with the old and the new methods.” The young composer went to Rome and Naples in the spring of 1886. Strauss tells an amusing incident. “A few days ago I was conducting this symphony at Brunswick, when a policeman appeared on the scene and stopped the performance because, as he said, some condition had not been complied with. Soon after, however, another policeman came and said the concert might proceed. This unwarrantable interruption caused great uproar, and the audience shouted anathemas against the police. At the close of the symphony I turned to the audience and said, ‘You see, ladies and gentlemen, in this Italy there are no anarchists!’”