The popular musico-historical image of Richard Strauss misrepresents both the composer and his music. As this thesis shows, such misrepresentation results from a failure to recognise the significance of Romantic heroic idealism to Strauss's compositional aesthetic. In his aesthetic, heroism operates at a fundamental level where musical self-representation exists as the expression of the Romantic heroic self and its subjectivity. This thesis, presented in two parts, examines firstly the concept of Romantic heroism, itself a misunderstood phenomenon, and, secondly, the ways that a deeper understanding of heroism functions as the underlying impetus for apprehending Strauss's approach to creativity. This creativity is tantamount to the composer's invention of a musical self. Chapter One examines nineteenth-century heroism as an ideological, aesthetic, and philosophical phenomenon, looking at how the early Romantics defined the hero and the centrality of notions of self-identity and self-consciousness to this definition. These notions legitimised subjectivity and realistic artistic self-portrayal. Chapters Two to Four examine literature, painting, and photography, respectively, as artistic spheres in which the idea of self became particularly pronounced. This is seen in the adoption of Romantic irony expressed as extreme realism. As a remedy for self-consciousness, this realism signalled the development towards the acute subjectivity of later nineteenth-century auto-heroism. Part Two, Chapters Five to Eight, considers Strauss's heroic allegiance, understood as an auto-heroic stage of heroism. His aesthetic notion of self is shown to have been specifically derived from social, national, and cultural spheres, all of which reinforced and demonstrated the realistic and auto-heroic expression of the musical self. Having established Strauss's historical reputation (Chapter Five) for the purpose of presenting the image which heroism amends, the idea of self obtaining from the social sphere of education (Chapter Six), and from the broader cultural and national outlooks suggested by Goethe (Chapter Seven) and Wagner (Chapter Eight), are considered. Within these chapters, the ways that these ideas of self are translated into the music itself are explored particularly in relation to the tone poems from Also sprach Zarathustra through to Eine Alpensinfonie. Romantic heroism enables Strauss's music to be understood as the product of a well-defined aesthetic theory within which self-representation is fully justified, thereby challenging the composer's predominating image.