One fine summer morning in 1991 my telephone rang, and the voice announced itself as John de Lancie. I could hardly have been more astounded had it been Strauss himself. For this, 50 years later, was the man to whom we owe the existence of the Oboe Concerto. Since this is such a touching story, and especially since some of the details are not quite correct in my father Norman's generally authoritative biography of Strauss (1972:432, 437; for a start he was de Lancie, not de Lancy), it is worth setting the record straight. What follows is from the mouth of the man himself; I have a delightful photograph of him, together with his wife, in our garden in London.

The collapse of Germany had left Strauss penniless. In the first weeks after US forces reached the Bavarian Alps, his family received many American visitors at their villa at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, who would arrive with such valued gifts as coffee, tobacco and soap for the world's most famous living composer. One such regular guest was the teacher and musicologist Alfred Mann, who one day in Garmisch just after the end of World War II quite by chance bumped into de Lancie, who had been a fellow student of his at the Curtis Institute of Music, more recently solo oboist with the Pittsburgh Symphony, and took him along to meet the Strauss family. John de Lancie continues the story of his visits:

“I felt a very respectful awe for this man, and I was convinced I would not be able to contribute anything in conversation which could be of interest to the composer. But Strauss spoke excellent French, so I was able to speak directly to him, and I mustered all my courage and began to talk about the beautiful oboe melodies like those in Don Quixote, Don Juan, Sinfonia domestica and others. I wanted to know if he had a special affinity for this instrument. As I was well acquainted with his Horn Concerto [No.1] I asked him if he had ever considered writing a concerto for oboe, but his only answer was a simple ‘no’.”

But the seed was sown, and some months later de Lancie was astonished to read a news item in a US Armed Forces newspaper: “