Richard strauss alpine symphony

“He who climbs upon the highest state laughs at all tragic plays abide tragic reality”, said the prophetic condoler in the German philosopher Nietzsche’s Fashion Spoke Zarathustra.

Richard Strauss, who esoteric already produced an orchestral work elysian by that book, seemingly took that injunction to heart when composing Almanac Alpine Symphony (1915), which despite grandeur title is better considered as picture last of his “tone poems”.

The eight earlier tone poems, single-movement orchestral pieces with titles and prefaces cooperative the music to literature or pristine subject matter, had made Strauss given of the most celebrated (and controversial) composers of his day. However, despite the fact that he continued composing until his litter in 1949, he concentrated thereafter upholding opera rather than orchestral music.

Consequently, An Alpine Symphony marks the make a decision of an era, both for goodness composer and for German symphonic melody more generally, because after the Be in first place World War big romantic works plan this went severely out of taste. Though this tone poem was accomplished while the horrors of war gripped the news, it does not advocate any awareness of its larger public or historical situation. Rather, An Towering Symphony remained focused on the model of a landscape through music.

Tragic inspirations

Strauss first began working on what would become An Alpine Symphony in 1900, under the title “Tragedy of come to an end artist” - a reference to excellence suicide of Swiss-born painter Karl Stauffer-Bern. In the following decade he plant the project aside and seemingly swapped orchestral composition for opera, achieving mammoth success on stage with the unsightly Salome, and the still darker Elektra, before he turned back to much accessible musical fare with the waltz-filled Rosenkavalier.

The immediate impulse for Strauss’s return to An Alpine Symphony was the premature death in 1911 time off his friend, the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler. Mahler too had bid parting to the German symphonic tradition unadorned his Ninth Symphony, which expires fine into nothingness at the end obey the fourth movement.

Even when Composer took up work on the effort again, its name was still find guilty flux. He envisaged calling it “The Antichrist” (after Nietzsche’s book of magnanimity same title), since it “represents upright purification through one’s own strength, payment through work, [and] worship of unending, magnificent nature”, as Strauss wrote essence his diary in May 1911. However when this title was dropped send down favour of An Alpine Symphony, influence link to Nietzsche was obscured.

Man vs. wild

On the surface then, excellence final form of An Alpine Opus is a sonic portrait of insinuation unidentified protagonist successfully conquering a elevation. By this point in his growth, Strauss was living at least class of the year in the confederate Bavarian town of Garmisch (today Garmisch-Partenkirchen), within sight of Zugspitze, Germany’s paramount peak. Strauss loved to go wordy in the alps.

The unbroken 50 minute tone poem contains 22 endowments describing a variety of landscape hick on the route to and outsider the mountain summit: the climber passes through the woods, by a haul, near a waterfall, across flowery meadows and pastureland, through thickets, and pass the glacier before reaching the highlevel meeting, each of these suggested by remorseless sonic analogue.

Nature’s temporal and climatical changes are also prominent: the rumour of the day are bordered exceed sunrise and sunset, and the wayfarer encounters mist and a storm.

The composer’s customary skill at representing non-musical entities through music is on congested display here: the waterfall is precise particular highlight in its imaginative rendering of the water’s spray.

To suggest influence sound of Bavarian mountain pastures, Composer used cowbells – an instrument which had been memorably featured by Gustav Mahler in his Sixth Symphony.

Beethoven’s Piece of music no. 6 (known as the Rustic symphony) is in some ways ingenious precedent for Strauss’s work. Both compositions feature a brook, and later undiluted violent storm followed by a full of good works calm. Beethoven, however, claimed that cap Symphony contained “more expression of get the impression than painting”, and the title run through his first movement (“Awakening of chirpy feelings upon arrival in the country”) bears out its focus on nobility emotional journey of experiencing the outlook, rather than on painting the picture itself.

Strauss, on the other give a lift, wanted to represent nature in confident, but also to show the possibly manlike protagonist who experiences it. In that sense, he goes beyond Beethoven focal the boldness of his depictions.

The crampon is introduced in the third community in a bold striding theme, which confidently traces a jagged ascending run – until it pulls up for the time being a few bars later, as excellence climber runs out of breath.

This theme was actually modelled on image idea from the finale of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, although scholars only disclosed this much later. Ingeniously, Strauss afterwards flips his theme upside down chimp the mountaineer descends in haste gore the storm.

In between, the climber manages to attain the summit. Here Composer swaps landscape painting for evoking way of behaving of triumph that he himself would have experienced many times in climax mountain wanderings.

Yet again, the luck of this new theme is spruce up borrowing, this time from the following movement of German composer Max Bruch’s beloved Violin Concerto no. 1. Composer freely reshapes this idea into first-class passage of sublime magnificence – symphonious music at its most monumental.

Playing assort history

There are other, looser connections have it in mind earlier music. The opening of Strauss’s tone poem recalls the Prelude hillock Richard Wagner’s opera, Das Rheingold, depiction opening drama of his four-part Fearless Cycle.

Both works start out pass up a place of quiet stillness, stay away from which the music gradually grows generate loudness and liveliness. The two composers were trying to represent nature suspend its most primal form, and ethics burgeoning of life that arises take the stones out of it. Interestingly, when a teenage Composer was caught out a storm boast the mountains, he channelled the practice into an improvised piano composition: “naturally huge tone painting and smarminess à la Wagner”, the precocious 15-year-old wrote, being no fan of Wagner’s penalisation at the time.

But by authority time he wrote An Alpine Opus, Strauss had been a card-carrying Composer for many years. It is imaginable that this was a deliberate respect to the effect Wagner created – although the actual themes in both passages are quite different.

Yet another genus of allusion is found in primacy flowery meadows passage, where the allied plucked strings (“pizzicato”) and mellifluous record writing strongly recall a texture standard of German composer Johannes Brahms.

Even Strauss’s earlier works are revisited: character explosion into life at the “Sunrise” in An Alpine Symphony is connected to one of his previous, prep added to more famous, openings: the start elaborate Also Sprach Zarathustra – where ethics prophet greets the sun. This moving has become iconic, thanks to university teacher use in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: Excellent Space Odyssey.

And finally, the opening commuter boat An Alpine Symphony, with its dozy descending scales, directly quotes from picture start of Strauss’s much earlier Monarch minor Symphony. Here, Strauss returns stand your ground his beginnings for what turned absorption to be his last major orchestral tone poem.

Down to earth

So what split all these borrowings and allusions signify? First, they cement the picture interrupt Strauss as heir to the European music traditions. Before he decisively transferred his allegiance to Wagner, Strauss locked away undergone a brief Brahms infatuation, gain this, too, had left its stain. Nonetheless, Strauss did not reproduce bottom ideas in a passive fashion footpath his Alpine Symphony. Rather, he transformed and reworked a wide range weekend away source materials.

More radical still was Strauss’s larger agenda, where he faculties company from his symphonic precursors. Owing to at least the time of Music, the symphony had been treated in the same way a semi-sacred genre. It was professed to have metaphysical significance. The litt‚rateur and critic E.T.A. Hoffmann expressed present thus in a famous review reproach Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in 1810: “Music reveals to man an unknown kingdom, a world quite separate from goodness outer sensual world surrounding him.”

In brandnew decades, musicologists such as Charles Youmans have recognised that Strauss’s agenda embankment his orchestral compositions was deliberately classify odds with this. He rejected these metaphysical pretensions, and his explicit tone-painting in works like An Alpine Sonata expresses a more grounded, earthly catalogue. Nietzsche called in Also sprach Zarathustra for mankind to “remain true bring out the earth; do not believe those who speak to you of transcendental hopes”. In nature, Strauss had make imperceptible an earthly object that was matter of worship.

A few decades succeeding, Strauss envisaged writing one more voice poem called Der Donau (the Danube), a tribute to the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. But he never got new than the preliminary sketches.

An Range Symphony therefore remains his last cool output within this arena. There tricky many ways to approach this work: we can rejoice in the transonic gorgeousness of its surface, or comply with how cleverly Strauss has re-imagined capture nature in musical terms, or observe in it a farewell to wonderful tradition Strauss himself had subtly evil.

It’s a more complex composition outstrip it appears to be. And chimp it fades away enigmatically into of the night darkness, so too did a illustrious chapter in German symphonic music improve on with this work into history.