With the passage of time, "Tristan" became more favourably regarded. In an interview shortly before his death, Giuseppe Verdi said that he "stood in wonder and terror" before Wagner's "Tristan". In "", writer and satirist George Bernard Shaw writes that "Tristan" was "an astonishingly intense and faithful translation into music of the emotions which accompany the union of a pair of lovers" and described it as "a poem of destruction and death". Richard Strauss, initially dismissive of "Tristan," claimed that Wagner's music "would kill a cat and would turn rocks into scrambled eggs from fear of hideous discords." Later, however, Strauss became part of the Bayreuth coterie and writing to Cosima Wagner in 1892 declared: "I have conducted my first "Tristan". It was the most wonderful day of my life." In 1935 he wrote to Joseph Gregor, one of his librettists, that "Tristan und Isolde" was "the end of all romanticism, as it brings into focus the longing of the entire 19th century."