During his long and exceptionally fruitful creative life, Richard Strauss composed only a few works for the cello. Only three have survived and small as that number may seem, those works are critical to the composer’s development. Daniel Müller-Schott sees the early Sonata and the late tone poem Don Quixote as marking the path that was to lead Strauss within the space of a few years from Romanticism to the Modern era in music. The cellist highlights this watershed in Strauss’s artistic development with his own transcriptions, expressly made for this album, of the songs Zueignung and Ich trage meine Minne.