Librettovertonung oder Tondichtung?

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-24
Author(s):  
Walter Werbeck
Keyword(s):  
Tone Poem

<Feuersnot>, Strauss' zweite Oper, ist gewiß weder eine Tondichtung noch eine bloße Librettovertonung, auch kein "stage tone poem" - wie Norman Del Mar <Salome> und <Elektra> bezeichnete. Aber Strauss bediente sich erstmals bei der Musik derjenigen Mittel, mit denen er schon in seinen Tondichtungen ausgiebig gearbeitet hatte: Steigerungen und Kontraste und der verschmähte auch Elemente der Sonatensatzform nicht. Das war schon deshalb wichtig, weil die dramaturgische Anlage des Librettos von Ernst von Wolzogen über weite Strecken jedweder Logik entbehrte. Strauss mußte sich auf die Stimmigkeit seiner Musik verlassen. Er komponierte eine formale Syntax, bei der ihm seine Erfahrungen mit den mehrdimensionalen Formen der Tondichtungen entgegenkamen. Auch die Orchesterbehandlung, Melodik, Thematik und Harmonik sind ohne seine programmatischen Orchesterwerke nicht zu denken.

What the Climber Saw: Strauss's Alpensinfonie and the Romantic Tradition of Nature Representation

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
David Larkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Emotional Reactions ◽  
Tone Poem ◽  
Peak Response ◽  
Landscape Features ◽  
Musical Compositions ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
The Relationship

Initially criticized for its naïve representation of landscape features, Strauss's Alpensinfonie (1915) has in recent years been reinterpreted by scholars as a deliberate challenge to metaphysics, a late outgrowth of the composer's fascination with Nietzsche. As a consequence, the relationship between Strauss's tone poem and earlier artworks remains underexplored. Strauss in fact relied heavily on long-established tropes of representing mountain scenes, and when this work is situated against a backdrop of similarly themed Romantic paintings, literature, travelogues and musical compositions, many points of resemblance emerge. In this article, I focus on how human responses to mountains are portrayed within artworks. Romantic-era reactions were by no means univocal: mountains elicited overtly religious exhalations, atheistic refutations of all supernatural connections, pantheistic nature-worship, and also artworks which engaged with nature purely in an immanent fashion. Strauss uses a range of strategies to distinguish the climber from the changing scenery he traverses. The ascent in the first half of Eine Alpensinfonie focuses on a virtuoso rendition of landscape in sound, interleaved with suggestions as to the emotional reactions of the protagonist. This immanent perspective on nature would accord well with Strauss's declared atheism. In the climber's response to the sublime experience of the peak, however, I argue that there are marked similarities to the pantheistic divinization of nature such as was espoused by the likes of Goethe, whom Strauss admired enormously. And while Strauss's was an avowedly godless perspective, I will argue in the final section of the article that he casts the climber's post-peak response to the sublime encounter in a parareligious light that again has romantic precedents. There are intimations of romantic transcendence in the latter part of the work, even if these evaporate as the tone poem, and the entire nineteenth-century German instrumental tradition it concludes, fades away into silence.

Icarus Soaring: the music of John Pickard

Tempo ◽  
1997 ◽  
pp. 2-5
Author(s):  
Guy Rickards
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
String Quartets ◽  
Tone Poem ◽  
Choral Works ◽  
Piano Trio ◽  
The Past ◽  
Chamber Ensembles ◽  
Brass Band ◽  
Orchestral Works ◽  
Almost All

Although John Pickard's music has received a good many performances and radio broadcasts over the past decade, it was the relay of his dazzling orchestral tone poem The Flight of Icarus (1990) during the 1996 Proms1 which brought him to the notice of the wider concert–going and –listening public. There is some justice in that piece attracting such attention, as it is one of his most immediate in impact, while completely representative of his output at large. That output to date encompasses three symphonies (1983–4, 1985–7, 1995–6) and five other orchestral works, three string quartets (1991, 1993, 1994; a fourth in progress), a piano trio (1990), sonatas for piano (1987) and cello and piano (1994–5), vocal and choral works, pieces for orchestral brass (Vortex, 1984–5) and brass band – the exhilarating Wildfire (1991), which crackles, hisses and spits in ferocious near–onomatopoeia, and suite Men of Stone (1995), celebrating four of the most impressive megalithic sites in Britain, one to each season of the year. There are other works for a variety of solo instruments and chamber ensembles, such as the intriguing grouping of flute, clarinet, harpsichord and piano trio in Nocturne in Black and Gold (1983) and the large–scale Serenata Concertante for flute and six instruments of a year later. Still in his mid-thirties – he was born in Burnley in 1963 – Pickard has already made almost all the principal musical forms of the Western Classical tradition his own, with only opera, ballet and the concerto as yet untackled.

Comedy Ballet as Social Commentary:Till Eulenspiegel(1916)

2014 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 144-184
Author(s):  
Hanna Järvinen
Keyword(s):  
Tone Poem ◽  
Past Performance ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Vaslav Nijinsky

In 1916, during the American tours of the Ballets Russes company, Vaslav Nijinsky created a choreography to Richard Strauss's tone poem Till Eulenspiegels lustische Streiche, nach alter Schelmenweise, in Rondo Form (1894–1895). Only performed during the tour, the work was long deemed a failure or an indication of the choreographer's approaching insanity. Tracing the reviews and other contemporary materials, this article asks what can be known of a past performance and rehearsal practice – and what our interpretations of the past reveal of present-day concerns and assumptions about dance as an art form.

„And that is how my first records appeared under the name of Dr Richard Strauss“

2021 ◽  
Vol 61 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 255-292
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Second Step ◽  
Not Given ◽  
Don Juan ◽  
Tone Poem ◽  
Comparative Analyses ◽  
Richard Strauss

Abstract The paper deals with the first recording of Richard Strauss’s tone poem Don Juan, of which the first half (i.e. the first two of a total four sides of this 1916 78-rpm recording) has repeatedly been said to be conducted not by Richard Strauss, but by George Szell who served as Strauss’s assistant at the Berlin court opera at that time. By a close examination of written accounts, I wish to clarify the background of this narrative which Peter Morse, somehow misleadingly, has called an “old story” as early as in 1977, though it seems that it was not given currency prior to the late 1960s when Szell himself mentioned the recording en passant during an interview. In a second step, comparative analyses of certain sections from both this 1916 and Strauss’s later recordings of Don Juan will not only proof Szell’s participation, but aim at determining the respective interpretational concepts in their differing performance choices. Finally, further comparison between Szell’s later Don Juan recordings (1943, 1957, 1969) and selected performances by contemporary conductors intends to help situate Szell within the Austro-German Espressivo tradition, whereby the detailed analysis of tempo-dramaturgical strategies in these recordings will itself contribute to a differentiation of the frequently simplified notion of “Espressivo.”

Music for Chamber Ensemble (and ‘Scenes from Schumann’)

Tempo ◽  
1979 ◽  
pp. 20-26
Author(s):  
David Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Chamber Music ◽  
Song Cycle ◽  
Chamber Ensemble ◽  
Song Cycles ◽  
Tone Poem

It would be a mistake to suggest that Robin Holloway's works for chamber ensemble form a coherent group. One cannot even unhesitatingly apply the term ‘chamber music’ to all the works under consideration here: Fantasy-Pieces, Evening with Angels and the Concertino No.3 are not significantly different in scope from the orchestral pieces to which each is most closely related—Scenes from Schumann, Domination of Black and the two earlier Concertinos respectively; that is to say, one can just as easily see them as orchestral pieces manquées. What can be stated with certainty is that among Holloway's chamber ensemble pieces are to be found some of his favourite forms and some of his most characteristic ideas, both musical and extra-musical. Garden Music and the Serenade in C, for instance, are divertimenti like the three works which bear that name: essentially, relaxed pieces for civilized enjoyment. Evening with Angels has affinities both with the tone-poem and the song-cycle—the latter such a beloved form of Holloway's that of his 41 opus numbers to date, no less than eighteen are song-cycles of various kinds. The Rivers of Hell is also a kind of tone-poem, as well as being Holloway's most ambitious exercise so far in purely chamber sonorities.

scholarly journals An Analysis of Haydn Wood’s Mannin Veen as It Relates to Manx Folk Songs and Legends From the Isle of Man

SAGE Open ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 215824402095493
Author(s):  
Haley Armstrong
Keyword(s):  
Wind Band ◽  
Folk Songs ◽  
Tone Poem ◽  
Original Source ◽  
Isle Of Man ◽  
Mannin Veen ◽  
Source Materials

Haydn Wood (1882–1959) was an English composer raised on the Isle of Man. His compositional strengths lay in melodic writing and scoring, and he is best remembered as a composer of British light music. Haydn Wood has also been credited with composing works for wind band, most notably, Mannin Veen: A Manx Tone Poem. Given the lack of research on Haydn Wood, his compositions and his homeland, this article focuses on the transcribed wind work Mannin Veen as it relates to Manx folksongs and legends from the Isle of Man. In this article, comprehensive research on Haydn Wood, The Isle of Man, and Mannin Veen is provided. For the analysis, original source materials are provided that can be used by conductors to better prepare and perform these works.

scholarly journals A Hero’s Life and Nietzschean Struggle in Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben

MANUSYA ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-133
Author(s):  
Ampai Buranaprapuk
Keyword(s):  
Tone Poem ◽  
Also Sprach Zarathustra ◽  
Ein Heldenleben ◽  
Peace And War

Nietzsche influenced Strauss throughout the composer’s mature career, from Also sprach Zarathustra, Op. 30 (1896), which shares the same name as the treatise by Nietzsche, to Eine Alpensinfonie, Op. 64 (1911–15), which initially bore the title Der Antichrist, after Nietzsche’s 1888 essay. Nietzsche, through Zarathustra, stresses the idea of the Übermensch, which proposes that the human occupies the stratum between the primal and the super-human. The Übermensch is not, however, the zenith for a man. The goal for man is rather his journey toward self-overcoming, his struggle within himself. In Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life, 1898), Strauss incorporates Nietzschean concepts without any direct references to Nietzsche. The designation of a man as a hero, the battle as an obstacle with which one struggles, the alternation between peace and war and the cycle of recurrence in this tone poem all reflect Nietzsche’s ideas. This research considers the tone poem from a hermeneutical perspective and argues that Strauss’s hero in Ein Heldenleben embodies qualities encompassing the true Nietzschean hero.

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