The War Quartet tetralogy tells the stories of four great composers who fight for their lives and the life of music when totalitarianism and the horrors of war are assaulting Europe: Béla Bartók, Richard Strauss, Dimitri Shostakovich and Arnold Schoenberg. In the second volume, No One Can Understand Themselves, Richard Strauss, considered the greatest composer of his day, decides to stay in Nazi Germany and accept the presidency of the Reich Chamber of Music in order to protect his family—his daughter-in-law and two grandchildren are Jewish—and to ensure that his opera Die schweigsame Frau, with a libretto by Stefan Zweig, is performed, and to contribute to German culture. A controversial decision which leads him to be seen as a collaborator and, after the war, undergo a denazification programme that lasts over three years.