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

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.

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

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.”

Librettovertonung oder Tondichtung?

<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.

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

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.

Musical idioms in Șerban Marcu’s Toccatas

The present research focuses on the toccata in a contemporary stylistic context, as a revival of the Baroque toccata in the creation of a Romanian composer from Cluj-Napoca, Șerban Marcu. He is a representative of the mature school of composition, studying under the tutorship of the celebrated Romanian composer Cornel Țăranu. His style unveils a series of constant traits, such as the programmatic feature and the preference towards musical forms and genres pertaining to the Western musical tradition, among them the madrigal, the song, the bagatella, the variations, the suite, the étude, the tone poem, the ballet or even the opera. He wrote five toccatas over the span of a decade. The toccata – understood both as a musical genre and a composing technique – is to be found in his output either as a movement in a mini-suite (Free Preview, 2008), or as an autonomous work, written for solo instruments as the piano (Toccatina, 2017), the organ (Balkan Toccata, 2018), as well as for various chamber ensembles, each featuring, among other instruments, the piano (tocCaTa brevissima, 2014, Toccata impaziente, 2018). The analysis unfolds by taking as focal point a series of keywords that have circumscribed the term toccata within the musicological literature. These core concepts are further placed in relationship with various techniques – neo-baroque as well as modern ones – which are to be identified in Șerban Marcu’s output of toccatas. The analytical procedures focus on highlighting the tradition/innovation binomial and are layered by taking into discussion the parameters of the musical discourse, namely the form, the musical language, the idiomatic instrumental writing, the compositional techniques, as well as aesthetic aspects such as the playfulness, the comic, the irony, the bizarre, the caricature and the paraphrase.

Shock, Awe, and Synthesis

Dubstep is one of the most polarizing of musical styles, but not for any graphic lyrics or hypersexuality—its power to unsettle is located in its bold digital timbres. Digital audio workstations (DAWs) give Skrillex and other producers the ability to create new sounds and manipulate existing ones until they are unrecognizable, using a few mouse clicks and keyboard taps. Reverb and filters are two other tools the DAW can add to the mix. “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites,” discussed in Chapter 13, is a modern tone poem that takes listeners on a timbral journey from lightness to darkness, each sound carefully sculpted for maximum shock and awe.

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

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.

THE SYMBOLISM OF THE MOUNTAIN IN THE EUROPEAN AND ROMANIAN SYMPHONIC CREATION

Background: This analytical approach aims to accentuate the interconnections between two universes which are apparently in contradiction: ideal and pragmatic, or symbol and sound. The mountain – viewed as a place of creative inspiration – represents a leitmotif of creation in most of the artistic fields. Thus, literature, visual arts and music give this symbol a historical anchor in the artistic movements of all eras Methods: In order to exemplify a possible way of interference between the two philosophical areas, we have chosen as a “contact unit” the symbol of the mountain, observing the intuition with which it was represented in Alpen Symphony by Richard Strauss and the tone poem The Mountain by Csíky Boldizsár. In the compositional context of the twentieth century, Richard Strauss made a remarkable creation with a strong philosophical idea as a model of descriptive Programmatism. In his work, the composer suggests the ascension of a traveler in a mountain climb that encounters, in his journey, places either protected by nature or dangerous The whole journey is dominated by majestic symbols of life, nature, and, and resembles an initiatic journey through which the hero is challenged to push himself to the limits and evolve. Equally, this is an allegory of life. On the summit, The Glacier, or The Storm are just some symphonic scenes with complex symbolic connotations that will be analyzed in this research through the connection with the componistic technique of the creator. In a mysterious universe, the tone poem The Mountain by Csíky Boldizsár depicts the monumental landscape of the Transylvanian lands, the symbols of greatness, boundlessness and eternity. The intention of the composer is to raise a monument dedicated to the invincible human will, a force that drives explorers of unknown seas and lands, researchers of all mysteries, poets, psychologists, artists, to the eternal unknown. In music, the composer uses an abstract language, anchored in modernity, using a whole arsenal of complex mixtures of chords, bartokian modes, non-imitative polyphony, mobile clusters, elements that serve the expression. Results, Conclusions: Finally, this research aims to demonstrate, as a synthesis, how the tonal and modal languages manage to illustrate the connotations extracted from the symbol of the mountain.