This would be more accurately entitled 'An Hour of Little-Known Beethoven including Two Minutes of Unknown Richard Strauss'. In 1924 Strauss and Hofmannsthal decided to rescue from neglect Beethoven's Ruins of Athens incidental music of 1812, which had been commissioned for the opening of the new theatre in Pesth (not yet united with Buda). Feeling that an overture and eight numbers did not provide enough for a decent evening's entertainment, they thought they would add Beethoven's Creatures of Prometheus music. After all, it was also on a Greek subject. They could overlook the fact that the Prometheus legend is a world away from the Kotzebue play in which a collapsed Athens has its glories restored in Hungary under the benevolent patronage of Kaiser Franz. Hofmannsthal linked the two by introducing a mysterious Stranger from distant Germany whose vision of the glory of Ancient Greece is realised in a scene of dancing Bacchantes, and finally - Dionysos yielding to Apollo, or rather Athene - of the restored Acropolis.
The Stranger's name or nature are never really revealed: he seems to be some mixture of Goethe longing for the warm south and Winckelmann revealing the 'noble simplicity and silent grandeur' of ancient Greek sculpture. His intervention provides the only original Strauss music, a two-minute melodrama cobbled together with themes from Beethoven's Third and Fifth Symphonies. For the rest, Strauss's contribution, as Norman Del Mar puts it, was 'almost a mere matter of shuffling together the appropriate pages from the two volumes of Beethoven's scores'. Rickenbacher and the Bamberg orchestra, with appropriate soloists, perform the music well, but it would be a very devoted Straussian who felt it worth adding the piece to his collection for the sake of so little.'