Richard Strauss composed the work, eventually known as Burleske for piano and orchestra, in 1885-86 when he was only 20. Originally titled Scherzo in D Minor, it was intended for Hans von Bülow, who had named Strauss assistant conductor of the Meiningen Court Orchestra. Though the Romantic, lyrical music seems to point the way to Strauss’s tone poems, Von Bülow refused to learn the exceptionally virtuosic piano part, declaring it a “complicated piece of nonsense,” “Lisztian,” and “unplayable” for anyone with a small handspan like himself (according to Strauss, Von Bülow could barely reach an octave).  Strauss took over the rehearsals, conducting and playing the solo part himself before ultimately setting it aside. As he wrote to von Bülow, he felt the work had promise: “[G]iven an outstanding (!) pianist, and a first-rate (!) conductor, perhaps the whole thing will not turn out to be the unalloyed nonsense I took it for after the first rehearsal.”

Strauss met Eugen d’Albert in 1889, who liked the work and suggested some revisions to the solo part. Strauss dedicated the revised work to d’Albert, who premiered the newly titled Burleske (meaning “farce” or “mockery”) in Eisenach on June 21, 1890, at a convention of the General German Music Association as part of a concert that also featured the premiere of Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration. Von Bülow was reportedly still unimpressed, however. As he wrote to Brahms in 1891, “Strauss’s Burleske has some genius, but in other respects, it is horrifying.” Still, Von Bülow led the work in Berlin later that month, with d’Albert as the soloist. Perhaps influenced by Von Bülow’s assessment, it took Strauss a long time to permit Burleske to be published, and he never personally allocated an opus number to the work.