“He who
climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all tragic plays and tragic
reality”, said the prophetic protagonist in the German philosopher Nietzsche’s
Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Richard Strauss,
who had already produced an orchestral work inspired by that book, seemingly
took this injunction to heart when composing An Alpine Symphony (1915), which
despite the title is better considered as the last of his “tone poems”.
The eight
earlier tone poems, single-movement orchestral pieces with titles and prefaces
linking the music to literature or other subject matter, had made Strauss one
of the most celebrated (and controversial) composers of his day. However,
although he continued composing until his death in 1949, he concentrated
thereafter on opera rather than orchestral music.
Consequently,
An Alpine Symphony marks the end of an era, both for the composer and for
German symphonic music more generally, because after the First World War big romantic
works like this went severely out of fashion. Though this tone poem was
completed while the horrors of war dominated the news, it does not suggest any
awareness of its larger political or historical situation. Rather, An Alpine
Symphony remained focused on the representation of a landscape through music.
Strauss
first began working on what would become An Alpine Symphony in 1900, under the
title “Tragedy of an artist” - a reference to the suicide of Swiss-born painter
Karl Stauffer-Bern. In the following decade he set the project aside and
seemingly swapped orchestral composition for opera, achieving enormous success
on stage with the scandalous Salome, and the still darker Elektra, before he
turned back to more 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 of his friend, the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler. Mahler too had
bid farewell to the German symphonic tradition in his Ninth Symphony, which
expires exquisitely into nothingness at the end of the fourth movement.
Even when
Strauss took up work on the project again, its name was still in flux. He
envisaged calling it “The Antichrist” (after Nietzsche’s book of the same
title), since it “represents moral purification through one’s own strength,
liberation through work, [and] worship of eternal, magnificent nature”, as
Strauss wrote on his diary in May 1911. But when this title was dropped in
favour of An Alpine Symphony, the link to Nietzsche was obscured.
On the
surface then, the final form of An Alpine Symphony is a sonic portrait of an
unidentified protagonist successfully conquering a mountain. By this point in
his career, Strauss was living at least part of the year in the southern
Bavarian town of Garmisch (today Garmisch-Partenkirchen), within sight of
Zugspitze, Germany’s highest peak. Strauss loved to go rambling in the alps.
The
unbroken 50 minute tone poem contains 22 parts describing a variety of
landscape features on the route to and from the mountain summit: the climber
passes through the woods, by a stream, near a waterfall, across flowery meadows
and pastureland, through thickets, and onto the glacier before reaching the
top, each of these suggested by some sonic analogue.
Nature’s
temporal and climatic changes are also prominent: the events of the day are
bordered by sunrise and sunset, and the hiker encounters mist and a storm.
Ka
rl
Stauffer-Bern, Portrait of Lydia Welti-Escher, 1886
Beethoven’s
Symphony no. 6 (known as the Pastoral symphony) is in some ways a precedent for
Strauss’s work. Both compositions feature a brook, and later a violent storm
followed by a beatific calm. Beethoven, however, claimed that his Symphony
contained “more expression of feeling than painting”, and the title of his
first movement (“Awakening of cheerful feelings upon arrival in the country”)
bears out its focus on the emotional journey of experiencing the landscape,
rather than on painting the landscape itself.
Strauss, on
the other hand, wanted to represent nature in sound, but also to show the human
protagonist who experiences it. In this sense, he goes beyond Beethoven in the boldness
of his depictions.
So what do
all these borrowings and allusions signify? First, they cement the picture of
Strauss as heir to the German music traditions. Before he decisively transferred
his allegiance to Wagner, Strauss had undergone a brief Brahms infatuation, and
this, too, had left its mark. Nonetheless, Strauss did not reproduce earlier
ideas in a passive fashion in his Alpine Symphony. Rather, he transformed and
reworked a wide range of source materials.
More
radical still was Strauss’s larger agenda, where he parts company from his
symphonic precursors. Since at least the time of Beethoven, the symphony had
been treated as a semi-sacred genre. It was perceived to have metaphysical
significance. The writer and critic E.T.A. Hoffmann expressed it thus in a
famous review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in 1810: “Music reveals to man an
unknown realm, a world quite separate from the outer sensual world surrounding
him.”
In recent
decades, musicologists such as Charles Youmans have recognised that Strauss’s
agenda in his orchestral compositions was deliberately at odds with this. He
rejected these metaphysical pretensions, and his explicit tone-painting in
works like An Alpine Symphony expresses a more grounded, earthly agenda.
Nietzsche called in Also sprach Zarathustra for mankind to “remain true to the
earth; do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes”. In nature,
Strauss had found an earthly object that was worthy of worship.
A few
decades later, Strauss envisaged writing one more tone poem called Der Donau
(the Danube), a tribute to the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. But he never got
further than the preliminary sketches.
An Alpine
Symphony therefore remains his last substantial output within this arena. There
are many ways to approach this work: we can rejoice in the sonic gorgeousness
of its surface, or admire how cleverly Strauss has re-imagined of nature in
musical terms, or hear in it a farewell to a tradition Strauss himself had
subtly subverted.
It’s a more
complex composition than it appears to be. And as it fades away enigmatically
into nocturnal darkness, so too did a glorious chapter in German symphonic
music pass with this work into history.
Richard
Strauss' Musical Mountain Climb. By Tom Huizenga. NPR, October 26, 2015.
Harrowing
tales of mountain climbing filled theaters this summer in such films as Meru
and Everest. But exactly 100 years ago today, audiences took a different kind
of climb when Richard Strauss premiered An Alpine Symphony, a majestic, musical
depiction of a dawn-to-dusk hike up the Alps.
We've
rounded up two Alpine Symphony experts to be our trail guides up the mountain.
Semyon Bychkov is conducting the symphony tomorrow night with Los Angeles
Philharmonic. David Hurwitz is the author of Richard Strauss: An Owner's Manual
and, like any good guide, he starts with a little background.
"An
Alpine Symphony was Strauss' last tone poem," he says. "By the time
he wrote it, he'd achieved a level of mastery in orchestration which was pretty
impressive, and this uses one of the largest orchestras ever assembled by
anybody, especially in the brass department. It has 20 French horns, two sets
of timpani, lots of extra trumpets and trombones, a wind machine, a thunder
machine, extra woodwinds. And he even used a contraption for the wind section
that would allow the players to hold long notes indefinitely without having to
breathe. It involved foot pumps and air tubes and things like that. So it's
quite an extravaganza."
Our climb
begins in the pre-dawn darkness with the quiet but granite-like music depicting
the mountain itself, the first of Strauss' 22 sonic trail markers. It's also
one of many themes that will return in various guises.
Gradually,
the music begins to glow with warmth from the strings. The sky is getting
brighter. Then suddenly the sun explodes over the mountain in a huge crescendo
with brass shining, a rolling bass drum and crashing cymbals.
"It's
a sort of blinding white light," Bychkov says.
Bychkov
acknowledges that this kind of musical depiction of nature is just the thing
that Strauss nails time and again in this piece. But it doesn't matter to the
conductor.
"It
took me a while to figure out that in fact it was not what I thought it was —
this programmatic work which describes a trip through the Alps," Bychkov
admits. For him the symphony is another kind of journey altogether.
"The
core of the piece is human life and what one goes thru in it, with the joys and
the sorrows and struggle and achievement," Bychkov explains. "So it
is deeply existential."
But David
Hurwitz says the Alpine Symphony is also very literal. You can't help but
notice the sheer sonic splendor along the hike in places like "Wandering
by the Brook" or "At the Waterfall."
"'The
Waterfall' is one of those glitzy passages that Strauss did better than anybody
else in the world," Hurwitz says. "It's [got] lots harps and little
bells, glockenspiel and stuff like that."
After the
waterfall, we head up through an alpine pasture, where we meet a yodeling
English horn and few cows.
"If
you ever see a performance of this symphony, you'll see some guy at the back of
the stage with all these clanking things walking around back there, because
Strauss' cows really sound like cows," Hurwitz says. "He was into
cows ... and sheep." Strauss gets the oboes to bleat with a flutter
tonguing technique.
But now,
after leaving the Alpine pasture, we've made a wrong turn. We're lost. Strauss
captures our confusion in music. But again, for Semyon Bychkov, there's a
deeper meaning.
"Doesn't
it happen in life all the time?" he asks. "How many detours everyone
of us makes in life? Think beyond that actual physical experience of going
through the bushes. Think of it as a metaphor."
He can
think of it as a metaphor, but we're on a hike, and we're almost to the top of
the mountain.
"After
the dangerous moments, all of a sudden we find ourselves on the summit,"
Hurwitz notes. "It's a long section, actually. You spend some time up
there looking around." For Bychkov, reaching the top is almost a spiritual
achievement.
"We
all aspire to something greater than ourselves," he says. "And there
can come a moment where we feel such elation at having reached something
extraordinary, greater than any one of us." Strauss' music isn't overly
boisterous or triumphant, instead there's a rapturous theme in the strings and
a tender oboe solo. We're content with our awesome vista.
But
suddenly, Hurwitz warns us, the weather shifts.
"And
just for a few seconds the mist rises," he says. "It's a wonderful,
mysterious passage with heavily divided strings, making these sort of clustery
chords like a harmonic fog over the orchestra."
It's the
calm before the storm; the orchestra is hushed. You can hear drops of rain
coming in the oboe, and powerful gusts blowing from the wind machine. Time to
take cover. Strauss' storm blows strong and violent.
"It's
very graphic," Hurwitz says. "You've got two sets of timpani pounding
away. The bass drum." Not to mention screaming piccolos and a booming pipe
organ.
Finally,
the winds and rain die down with soft pizzicato in the strings and trumpets softly
intoning the mountain theme.
We hike
down quickly, in time to watch a heart-warming sunset. Strauss gives us time to
ruminate on where we've been — all the beauty, and adversity. And where does
that leave us? It leaves Semyon Bychkov pondering the biggest of questions.
Why?
"I
mean, we spend our lifetime trying to figure out why we're here," Bychkov
says. He believes the Alpine Symphony offers some answers.
"I
can't live without it. It tells me about our world, our reason to live. It is a
guide to life for sure."
Although
performed as one continuous movement, An Alpine Symphony has a distinct program
which describes each phase of the Alpine journey in chronological order. The
score includes the following section titles (not numbered in the score):
Nacht (Night)
Sonnenaufgang
(Sunrise)
Der Anstieg (The
Ascent)
Eintritt in
den Wald (Entry into the Forest)
Wanderung neben
dem Bache (Wandering by the Brook)
Am
Wasserfall (At the Waterfall)
Erscheinung
(Apparition)
Auf blumigen
Wiesen (On Flowering Meadows)
Auf der Alm
(On the Alpine Pasture)
Durch
Dickicht und Gestrüpp auf Irrwegen (Through Thickets and Undergrowth on the
Wrong Path)
Auf dem Gletscher
(On the Glacier)
Gefahrvolle
Augenblicke (Dangerous Moments)
Auf dem Gipfel
(On the Summit)
Vision (Vision)
Nebel steigen auf
(Mists Rise)
Die Sonne
verdüstert sich allmählich (The Sun Gradually Becomes Obscured)
Elegie (Elegy)
Stille vor dem
Sturm (Calm Before the Storm)
Gewitter und
Sturm, Abstieg (Thunder and Tempest, Descent)
Sonnenuntergang
(Sunset)
Ausklang (Quiet
Settles)[13]
Nacht
(Night)
In terms of
formal analysis, attempts have been made to group these sections together to
form a "gigantic Lisztian symphonic form, with elements of an
introduction, opening allegro, scherzo, slow movement, finale, and
epilogue." In general, however, it is believed that comparisons to any
kind of traditional symphonic form are secondary to the strong sense of
structure created by the piece's musical pictorialism and detailed narrative.
I recently heard
a live performance of the symphony by the Dutch National Youth Orchestra and was again thrilled by its peculiarity. Truly an extravaganza.
What is the best recording?
The
position of Eine Alpensinfonie in Richard Strauss’s oeuvre – indeed, in any
music history more generally – has always been problematic. Completed in 1915,
it sits at the heart of a decade in which Strauss, comfortably ensconced in his
Salome-funded villa in Garmisch, was seen to have lost his position at the
forefront of the musical world. For many, it represented a last gasp of a lost
age of excess; a final essay in a genre – the tone poem – that was rooted in
the previous century, produced by a composer who made a speciality of
mismatching vast means to meagre ends.
The means
are, admittedly, vast: a dozen offstage horns (although Strauss sanctions their
parts being covered in the orchestra) as part of a beefy brass contingent, a
minimum of 18 first violins and a well-stocked percussion section bolstered by
wind machine, thunder machine and cowbells. The specified two harps, the
composer adds blithely, should be ‘doubled where possible’. The score even
suggests the wind players make use of a recently invented device, Bernhard
Samuels’s Aerophon, to help them with their long legato lines.
But what,
exactly, were the ends Strauss had in mind? Ever since the premiere, conducted
by Strauss with the Dresden Hofkapelle in Berlin on October 28, 1915, the work
seems widely to have been interpreted as straightforwardly pictorial. The
composer’s 22 descriptive headings in the score (a day’s trajectory, charting a
mountain walk and taking in a variety of Alpine sights) certainly encouraged
such a view, and in 1917 the American writer Henry T Finck suggested that ‘The
Alpensymphonie [sic], like its predecessors, presents no complicated riddles to
the interpreter’.
But what of
the score’s second half, where purely descriptive titles – such as ‘Gewitter
und Sturm, Abstieg’ (‘Thunderstorm and Tempest, Descent’) and ‘Sonnenuntergang’
(‘Sunset’) – start to mix with more enigmatic headings: ‘Vision’, ‘Elegie’ and
‘Ausklang’ (the musical term for ‘conclusion’, but also implying more generally
the waning, dying away of a sound or sounds)? Finck decided this represented ‘a
decided anticlimax. The teutonic mania for length comes into play, and the work
is made to last forty-five minutes, when twenty-five would have been better.’
For many
Straussians, though, the work’s final sections are anything but an anticlimax:
this is where its deeper meaning manifests itself. Research traces Eine
Alpensinfonie’s gestation back to the 19th century, taking in Strauss’s
personal recollections as well as reactions to the tragic lives (and deaths) of
the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and the painter Karl Stauffer (an obscure figure
today). It was the death of Mahler in 1911, however, that finally inspired
Strauss to start addressing the work in earnest: ‘I intend to call my Alpine
Symphony “Anti-Christ”,’ he wrote in a diary entry that surely offers the key.
‘Since it involves moral purification through one’s own effort, liberation
through work and the adoration of eternal, glorious nature.’
Symphony or
tone poem?
Part of the
confusion regarding the work stems from its title: adherents insist on its
symphonic stature, doubters dismiss it as a ‘musical Baedeker’ – a mere sonic
guidebook to the Alpine sights. But surely it should be possible for it to be
both, and any performance should find a balance that positions the descriptive
details within a coherent broader musical argument. In the best performances,
moreover, the piece also seems to be a meditation on the history of the tone
poem itself. In its earlier stages, we hear what can be achieved technically in
the genre (‘At last I have learnt to orchestrate,’ Strauss is reported to have
said at the final rehearsal); in the later stages, the composer, delving ever
deeper, shows what the genre, at its best, should achieve.
Strauss's
Alpine Symphony: which recording to own? Hugo Shirley finds recordings that best convey
the sense that something greater is at stake than the notes on the page in this
symphony-cum-tone poem exploring humanity and nature. Gramophone, January 12, 2018.
