Strauss had arrived at Weimar as Kapellmeister on September 8, 1889, in the residency of the Grand Dukes of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. The Hofkapellmaster (chief music director) was Eduard Lassen (1830-1904), who welcomed the young Strauss and "readily acknowledged his artistic superiority."Schuh, page 175. Strauss finished orchestrating his tone poem Death and Transfiguration soon after his arrival, and on November 11 he premiered his Don Juan. He spent many of his evenings, mostly in the company of Eduard Lassen, at the Künstlerheim, which he depicted to his father as "a frivolous means of passing the time, with a charming bar in an old smithy". An artists' ball was held there in December, in imitation of the Paris Universal Exhibition, which Richard attended as a blackamoor sweet-seller; it was for this occasion that he composed, on 7 December 1889, his Scherzo-Quartet for male voices on a text he had found on a box of matches made in Sweden: 'Ůtan svafvel och fosfor' (o. Op. 88).Schuh, page 182-3.
