the Swine [Schwein]". In 1880 he moved to Meiningen where he took the equivalent post, and where he built the Meiningen Court Orchestra into one of the finest in Germany; among his other demands, he insisted that the musicians learn to play all their parts from memory. It was during his five years in Meiningen that he met Richard Strauss (though the meeting actually took place in Berlin). His first opinion of the young composer was not favorable, but he changed his mind when he was confronted with a sample of Strauss's "Serenade". Later on, he used his influence to give Strauss his first regular employment as a conductor. Like Strauss, Bülow was attracted to the ideas of Max Stirner, whom he reputedly had known personally. In April 1892 Bülow closed his final performance with the Berlin Philharmonic, where he had been serving as Principal Conductor since 1887, with a speech "exalting" the ideas of Stirner. Together with John Henry Mackay, Stirner's biographer, he placed a memorial plaque at Stirner's last residence in Berlin. Some of his orchestral innovations included the addition of the five-string bass and the pedal timpani; the pedal timpani have since become standard instruments in the symphony orchestra. His accurate, sensitive, and profoundly musical interpretations established him as the prototype of the virtuoso conductors who flourished at a later date. He was also an astute and witty musical journalist. In the late 1880s he settled in Hamburg, but continued to tour, both conducting and performing on the piano. Bülow suffered from chronic neuralgiforme headaches, which were caused by a tumor of the cervical radicular nerves. After about 1890 his mental and physical health began to fail, and he sought a warmer, drier climate for recovery; he died in a hotel in Cairo, Egypt at the age of 64, only ten months after his final concert performance. Quotations "A tenor is not a man but a disease". To a trombonist: "Your tone sounds like roast-beef gravy running through a sewer". Upon being awarded a laurel wreath: "I am not a vegetarian". "Always conduct with the score in your head, not your head in the score". "Bach is the Old Testament and Beethoven the New Testament of music". "In the beginning was rhythm". Notable premieres As conductor Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Munich, 10 June 1865 Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Hofoper, Munich, 21 June 1868 As pianist Beethoven,