On the 11th January, 1889, Don Juan was performed for the first time. It was in Weimar and the twenty-five year old Strauss, then Court Kappellmeister in Goethe's city, conducted himself. More than eight years had gone by since Hermann Levi, the conductor of the original Parsifal performance, had given Strauss's first orchestral work (the unpublished Symphony in D minor) and a number of scores had been completed since, the Violin Concerto Op. 8, the Horn Concerto Op. 11, the Symphony in F minor Op. 12, From Italy Op. 16 and a few which remained unpublished. Since October, 1885, Strauss had been conducting, in Meiningen first and then in Munich, both opera and concerts, and had acquainted himself with all the problems of orchestral technique and sonority. Moreover, his father, first horn in the Munich Court Orchestra, was a musician of thorough knowledge and a man of hard principles who saw to it that his son was not carried away by his amazing facility and wild temperament, but that he acquired the craftsmanship which in the last instance divides the genius from the gifted amateur. And this Richard Strauss did, with the same facility and unerring sureness with which he threw his music on to paper: in a clean and careful handwriting without corrections, without hesitation, quick but unhurried, strangely reminiscent of Mozart's implacable manuscripts.