STRAUSS AND BEETHOVEN
Notes on the composers and the pieces
Ludwig van Beethoven
Piano Concerto No. 4
Richard Strauss
Eine Alpensinfonie
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Richard Strauss
Richard Strauss (1864-1949) was the son of Franz Strauss, the principal horn of the Munich Court Orchestra. He took up piano and violin at a young age, attended rehearsals of his father’s orchestra. He joined that orchestra at age thirteen and studied music with colleagues rather than attend a conservatory. Many of his early works were performed, but it was the Serenade in E-Flat that caught the ear of conductor Hans von Bülow, who programmed it and other Strauss works. Von Bülow also hired Strauss as assistant conductor with his Meiningen orchestra and recommended him for a conducting position in Munich.
Until 1885 Strauss’s music displayed the heavy influence of Johannes Brahms and Classical forms. That changed when he met Alexander Ritter, a violinist in the Meiningen and Munich orchestras who was married to Richard Wagner’s niece and had worked with Franz Liszt. Ritter turned Strauss toward Wagner and introduced him, in Strauss’s words, to the “basic principle of Liszt’s symphonic works in which the poetic idea…became…the guiding principle for my symphonic work.” The result was Aus Italien and a series of tone poems: Macbeth, Don Juan, Death and Transfiguration, Till Eulenspiegel, Also sprach Zarathustra, Don Quixote, Ein Heldenleben, and Symphonia Domestica.
Opera was the logical next step, and Strauss began with the Wagner-influenced Guntrum, which received a hostile reception in 1892. In 1901 he wrote with the more Straussian Feurersnot that served as a retort to the critics of Guntrum, but it took the revolutionary Salome (1905) and Elektra (1909) to put Strauss on the operatic map. He then moved on to write what he called a “Mozart opera”: Der Rosenkavalier (1911), a work that may stylistically suggest Mozart but whose rich melodies, chromatic harmony, and colorful orchestration are vintage Strauss. His chamber opera Ariadne auf Naxos (1912) continued to ignore the influence of the modernists at the time. The next nine operas vary from Classicism to Romanticism.
Strauss’s tone poem Eine Alpensinfonie (An Alpine Symphony) is one of his largest non-operatic works and his last major orchestral piece. He began it in 1899 in memory of Swiss painter Karl Stauffer-Bern and planned to call it Künstlertragödie ("Tragedy of an Artist"), only to set the project aside. After he resumed work on it in 1911 using parts of the 1899 draft, he named the work Die Alpen but set that aside, too. That same year the death of Strauss’s friend Gustav Mahler led him to write in his diary an odd reference to Mahler’s view of Christianity that touched on Alpine Symphony:
The death of this aspiring, idealistic, energetic artist [is] a grave loss...Mahler, the Jew, could achieve elevation in Christianity. As an old man the hero Wagner returned to it under the influence of Schopenhauer. It is clear to me that the German nation will achieve new creative energy only by liberating itself from Christianity…I shall call my alpine symphony: Der Antichrist, since it represents: moral purification through one’s own strength, liberation through work, worship of eternal, magnificent nature.
Four years later he returned to the work, this time as a two-part tone poem entitled Der Antichrist: Eine Alpensinfonie, but ultimately gave up on a two-part structure to produce the single movement Eine Alpensinfonie in 1915. The dedicatee was Count Nicolaus Seebach, director of the Royal Opera in Dresden, which had staged six Strauss operas. After Alpensinfonie, Strauss reserved his “big” utterances for the opera house, perhaps because the work concluded what he had to say with an orchestra alone.
Eine Alpensinfonie is a musical travelogue that depicts a climber’s trek up and down a mountain from predawn to nightfall. It was probably based on boyhood memories when Strauss and a group of climbers lost their way climbing a mountain and were caught in a storm. Although entitled a symphony, it is a giant tone poem, with each section a portrait of one segment of the trip as noted below:
- Nacht / Night — Quiet descending; probing, signal calls; dark brass
- Sonnenaufgang / Sunrise — Big main theme; soaring climax
- Der Anstieg / The ascent — Low strings rising, off-stage trumpets, horns, trombones
- Eintritt in den Wald / Entry into the wood — Huge full climax, horn and trombone theme, woodwind bird calls
- Wanderung neben dem Bache / A walk along the brook — Wandering passage builds up
- Am Wasserfall / At the waterfall — Waterfall sounds in winds and strings, very short section
- Erscheinung / A vision — Confusing section that slowly disappears in high strings
- Auf blumige Wiesen / Onto flowery meadows — Quiet long tune in strings, turns into long wandering string passage
- Auf der Alm / On the mountain pasture — Woodwind calls; horn solos, slow, wistful; cowbells; warm string passage, descending flutes, horns more active
- Durch Dickicht und Gestrüpp auf Irrwegen / Wrong turns through thicket and brush — Confusion
- Auf dem Gletscher / On the glacier — Distant trumpet calls; horn calls
- Gefahrvolle Augenblicke / Perilous moments — Quiet solo bassoon calls. confusion, high trumpet calls, straining strings; loud passage with timpani; huge orchestral sigh
- Auf dem Gipfel / At the summit — Oboe solo, lone bassoon phrases, cello solo, triumphant full orchestra
- Vision / A vision — brass calls, oboe solo, triumphant figures, vastness, organ enters
- Nebel steigen auf / The fog rises — Quiet poking about
- Die Sonne verdüstert sich allmählich / The sun is gradually obscured — Very quiet. Then stirring clarinets, muted trumpet
- Elegie / Elegy — Quiet, oboe solo, spooky strings, English horn solo, oboe solo
- Stille vor dem Sturm / Calm before the storm — Timpani roll, woodwind solos; spooky, clarinet “warning,” timpani, storm approaching
- Gewitter und Sturm, Abstieg / Thunder and rainstorm, the descent — Organ, brass, timpani outburst, wind machine, thunder machine
- Sonnenuntergang / Sunset — End of storm
- Ausklang / Ending (of the day) — Long section; quiet, slow; organ, horn solo, trumpet. All is peaceful
- Nacht / Night — Quiet opening music returns
—Roger Hecht
Roger Hecht plays trombone in the Mercury Orchestra. He is a former member of Bay Colony Brass (where he was also the Operations/Personnel Manager), the Syracuse Symphony, Lake George Opera, New Bedford Symphony, and Cape Ann Symphony, as well as trombonist and orchestra manager of Lowell House Opera, Commonwealth Opera, and MetroWest Opera. He is a regular reviewer for American Record Guide, contributed to Classical Music: Listener’s Companion, and has written articles on music for the Elgar Society Journal and Positive Feedback magazine. His fiction collection, The Audition and Other Stories, includes a novella about a trombonist preparing for and taking a major orchestra audition (English Hill Press, 2013).
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