These musical examples come from my essay "Strauss's Place in the Twentieth Century," which appears in Charles Youmans's anthology The Cambridge Companion to Richard Strauss. The first is a famous horn passage from Strauss's Salome (right before Herod's "Wer hat meinen Ring genommen?"); the second is the bass clarinet and bassoon line at the beginning of Schoenberg's Die glückliche Hand.
Strauss's enormous influence on the Second Viennese School has been much noted over the years, but I believe it's still underrated, not least because the eternal politics of twentieth-century historiography — radical vs. conservative, etc. — keep getting in the way. The fact is that Schoenberg adulated Strauss when he was young, and was intimidated by him in a way he never was with Mahler. Emphasizing the link does favors for both composers: Strauss seems less vulgar, Schoenberg less forbidding. I write this in lieu of a promised post on Jennifer Shaw and Joseph Auner's Cambridge Companion to Schoneberg — I'm a bit too frantic with other work to give this volume the attention it deserves. But let me note that Craig De Wilde offers an excellent summary of the Strauss-Schoenberg relationship from the other side. "It is rare when two great minds can parallel," De Wilde writes, "but it is even more remarkable when they intersect, if only for a moment."
Here's another set of examples — swirling flute passages by Strauss, Schoenberg, and Boulez (Salome, Pierrot lunaire, Le Marteau sans maître):
