On the heels of his American tour and his international rise, Strauss encountered his share of loss in the 1870s: His mother and brother Josef died around the same time, and his wife died of a heart attack in 1878. Strauss married two more times and remained productive right up until his final days. He was working on a ballet, Cinderella, when a respiratory illness turned into pneumonia and caused his death, on June 3, 1899, in Vienna.