When conductor Kent Nagano assumed the post of musical director of Munich's Bavarian State Opera in 2006, he had in mind to stage a new production of Richard Strauss’s Salome, the challenging one-act opera based on Oscar Wilde’s play. To precede this, he wanted to present a new work, and so turned to Wolfgang Rihm. In an interview with Die Zeit, Rihm said: 'I replied that there was really only one choice: the final scene from Schlusschor by Botho Strauss'. Nagano’s commission became the catalyst in transforming this desire into reality, resulting in Das Gehege – A nocturnal scene for soprano and orchestra.

Kent Nagano and Jean-Pascal Beintus first met in the orchestra pit at the Opéra de Lyon in 1988. After looking over Beintus’s first orchestral manuscript, the maestro, known for his openness and erudition, encouraged the young man to expand his musical horizons. Several pictorial projects came to Nagano’s mind, which he entrusted to Beintus’s musical imagination, including Wolf Tracks for narrator and orchestra (featuring Bill Clinton and Mikhail Gorbachev in the spoken parts), for which Beintus received a Grammy Award in 2004; and The Little Prince (2008), written for the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin’s family concerts series.