A melodrama is defined as a work, or part of it, in which the words are spoken over music. Even though operas have moments of melodrama, various composers have devoted entire musical pieces to this practice. In 1896-97, Strauss composed the melodrama Enoch Arden, for voice and piano, over Tennyson’s text. The work was created between the tone poems Also sprach Zarathustra, from 1896, and Don Quixote, from 1897, and, like these, it can be considered a mature work for a composer who, aged 33, still had a long and creative career ahead of him. At the time, it was Enoch Arden that delivered Strauss a resounding success, even greater than the one he had achieved with his tone poems. The subject matter refers us to Ulysses and Robinson Crusoe, but the melancholy of the sailor who loses and then finds his newly-rebuilt family, who thought him dead, is entirely romantic and finds its genius confirmation in Strauss’s music. The piano lends the key, so to speak, to enormous amounts of elements in the text, making it an indispensable partner to its reading. Having never been performed in Portugal, Vítor Moura’s translation was presented for the first time in 2021, with Nuno Vieira de Almeida and Rita Blanco.