Richard Strauss believed he was facing the end of his career as an operatic composer after the death in 1929 of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, his librettist for years. But, in October 1931, thanks to the intervention of a mutual friend, Stefan Zweig offered to write the libretto for his next opera, and soon both were immersed in a fertile artistic collaboration that would result in The Silent Woman, premiered in Dresden in 1935. This book collects their four years of relationship from the first letter, formal and respectful, from Zweig to the composer, until the last one from Strauss in December 1935, intercepted by the Gestapo, in which, despite pressure from the Nazi authorities, refused to stop working with the Jewish writer. A book of inestimable value that documents the exchange between two great artists of opposite temperaments and their struggle to preserve independence under a totalitarian regime.