Richard Strauss

Eine Alpensinfonie (An Alpine Symphony), Op. 64

Richard Strauss was born in Munich in 1864 and died in Garmisch, Germany in 1948. He completed this work in 1915 using sketches composed over a four year period. Strauss led the first performance in Berlin with the Dresden Royal Orchestra in 1915.  The score calls for an enormous orchestra: 4 flutes, 2 piccolos, 3 oboes, English horn, heckelphone, 4 clarinets, bass clarinet, E-flat clarinet, 4 bassoons, contrabassoon, 8 horns, 4 tenor tubas, 4 trumpets, 4 trombones, 2 tubas, 16 offstage brasses, timpani, percussion (including wind machine and thunder machine), 2 harps, celeste, organ, and strings. Duration is approximately 51 minutes.

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Every work by Richard Strauss is an adventure, but none quite so literally as the Alpine Symphony: it is a mountain-climb in sound. The hikers rise at dawn, begin their ascent, pause occasionally to reflect upon Nature’s beauty, reach the summit, are caught in a storm, and descend at sunset. All in a day’s work for Strauss!

Strauss had conceived the Alpine Symphony as early as 1900 and composed sketches for it starting in 1911. He usually composed quickly, but he worked on this piece at odd hours, almost as a hobby. When his favorite librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, was delayed in supplying him the text for their next operatic collaboration (Die Frau ohne Schatten) he finally had the time to finish the work. “I wanted to compose,” he said, “as a cow gives milk.”

Strauss commonly specified a large orchestra for his works, but the requirements for the Alpine Symphony were nearly insane: aside from the usual strings, he called for quadrupled winds, eight horns, four trumpets, four trombones, two tubas, four tenor tubas, several exotic toys in the percussion, and—as if this weren’t enough—sixteen offstage brasses. “Finally, I have learned to orchestrate!” exclaimed Strauss, to which a judicious person might rightly respond, “Egads.” But if anyone could handle such an aggregation, it was Strauss.

Strauss ruffled the usual feathers when he called his work a “symphony.”  It isn’t;  it’s a tone-poem. Though it is possible to extrapolate a symphonic scenario out of the 22 sections of the work, it isn’t particularly useful. The music flows rapidly from one scene to the next in one continuous movement. As many as 60 themes depict things along the way, including animals, rustling leaves, burbling streams, fairies, flowers, waterfalls, a thunderstorm . . . well, you get the picture.

Strauss wasn’t just adept at painting musical pictures; his other tone poems reveal his eagerness to portray the psychologies of his literary characters as well. The Alpine Symphony has no literary basis and no “characters,” but it does have a point to make beyond its narrative. Strauss—perhaps jokingly, but perhaps not—originally thought to call the work The Anti-Christ, a title that needs to be regarded in the Nietzchean context in which it was meant: in Strauss’ words, it represents “moral regeneration through one’s own effort, liberation through labor, and worship of eternal, glorious Nature.”

Independent of the composer’s subtext and his descriptive subtitles, would anyone recognize all these things in the music? Perhaps. But perhaps it doesn’t matter. Good program music invariably works just as well as music without the program, and it does so here. You may climb and descend the mountain according to Strauss’ guidelines (and the guide given below), or according to your own whims. Either way, it’s an adventure as only Strauss could compose.

Below are the section titles of the Alpine Symphony and musical indications of where they start. Many of the sections are quite short—some are less than a minute. It can be difficult at times to keep up, but those who want to follow Strauss’ plan faithfully—something best done, perhaps, with a recording—may find the following guide useful:

Night.

Sunrise. After a big crescendo, the first large climax of the piece.

The ascent. A new, ascending phrase for cellos alone.

Entry into the forest. A loud tutti chord with tam-tam; birdcalls.

Wandering by the brook. A burbling flute.

At the Waterfall. A big horn theme with cascading piccolos.

Apparition. (The Fairy Sprite of the Alps.) An oboe melody over string glissandi.

Flowering Meadows. A version of the cellos’ “Ascent” theme, but much quieter.

In the mountain pasture.  Cowbells, birdcalls.

Lost in thicket and undergrowth. Dense counterpoint; various themes combine and “lose their way.”

On the glacier. Huge blocks of brass, high trumpet.

Dangerous moments. Solo bassoon, other solo instruments over string tremolos.

 On the summit. Big brass chords followed by solo oboe.

Vision. Orchestral tutti; ascending horn melody, descending trombone melody.

The fog rises. After the climax, a bassoon melody and rising woodwind lines.

The sun gradually becomes obscured. String glissandos, high violin melody.

Elegy. Muted violin melody, descending woodwind lines.

Calm before the storm. An ominous timpani roll and a clarinet melody.

Thunder and tempest, descent.  Trombone chords with descending strings.

Sunset. Solemn brass with heavy organ chords.

Epilogue. Organ and solo horn.

Night. Soft, descending melodies.

                                                                —Mark Rohr