Ariadne auf Naxos (one act, 1912) was Richard Strauss's sixth opera and his third collaboration with Hugo von Hofmannsthal. It followed their extremely popular Der Rosenkavalier, and shows evidence of their artistic partnership taking a new direction with regard to subject matter and dramaturgy.

As Strauss and Hofmannsthal first conceived it, Ariadne was to have followed a performance of Molière's Le bourgeois gentilhomme (Der Bürger als Edelmann, or "The Bourgeois Nobleman") which, in turn, was to have included incidental music by Strauss. This version of Ariadne is part of a larger structure in which the one-act opera followed a Molière's two-act play. The two works are linked through dialogue, characters that occur in both, and also intriguing self-references about the nature of opera as uttered by some of Molière's rewritten characters.

Strauss and Hofmannsthal intended this large work for the brilliant director Max Reinhardt and the resources at his Deutsches Theater in Berlin. An undertaking of this scope required professional forces beyond the norm for many theaters. As such, the work in this form has some aspects of a festival piece, rather than the type of opera destined for repertoire. At the same time, the complete play and opera were an interesting experiment for Strauss and Hofmannsthal. The breadth of conception takes the collaboration from a German adaptation of a Molière comedy to a modernized opera seria in a single act. The latter departs further from tradition, with Molière's characters superimposed on an opera seria. It is a dual translation of the spoken drama into a comedy with music that differs from Strauss's more straightforward and shorter operas Salome and Elektra.

As to the music for Ariadne itself, the idiom is similar to that which occurs in Elektra and, to an extent, in Der Rosenkavalier for its emphasis on female voices. The music is continuous, with few set pieces in an overtly popular style. Yet the orchestration Strauss used helps to distinguish the music associated with Ariadne from the more comic interjections of Zerbinetta and the comedians. The final duet is effective for conveying Ariadne's apotheosis, although it is less satisfying a conclusion than the final trio, which was remade as a duet in Der Rosenkavalier.

The premiere of this first version of Ariadne auf Naxos took place on October 25, 1912, in Stuttgart. Its presentation was remarkable for the difficulties it posed in having both actors and singers prepared for a single evening of theater. Complications arose at the premiere, because the King of Württemberg held receptions that lasted almost an hour during each intermission, thus protracting further an already long evening. The premiere was received poorly, and subsequent criticism prompted the composer and librettist to refashion the work. They eventually split the play from the opera, to create two separate works. The incidental music for Le bourgeois gentilhomme became the basis for the suite Der Bürger als Edelmann, which Strauss completed in 1920; Ariadne auf Naxos was revised in 1916 as a discrete opera with a prelude, which is the more familiar and successful version of the work.

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