The death of Gustav Mahler in 1911 profoundly affected Richard Strauss, his near contemporary. One result was to reawaken interest in a project he had set aside years earlier involving the death of a visual artist and also inspired by his fascination for the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. His original plan was even more ambitious than the enormous, symphonically expansive tone poem in one movement that eventually crystallized as An Alpine Symphony. This was the last in his great series of tone poems, a genre Strauss had re-patented as his own when he first gained notoriety as a composer.

The initial impulse for An Alpine Symphony came from the tragic life of the Swiss painter and sculptor Karl Stauffer-Bern, who committed suicide after his affair with his patron’s wife became toxic. Strauss wrote to his parents in 1900 that he had in mind the “love tragedy of an artist” that would begin “with a sunrise in Switzerland.” But he put the project aside until Mahler’s death at only 50 years of age brought it back to mind.

Strauss’s admiration of Nietzsche is apparent from Also Sprach Zarathustra, his 1895 tone poem inspired by and titled after what is perhaps the German philosopher’s most famous work, which explores such key ideas as the “Superman” who defies convention and the “eternal return.”(Mahler, too, incorporated a text from Zarathustra into his Third Symphony.) Strauss initially intended to give An Alpine Symphony the title The Antichrist: An Alpine Symphony, borrowing from another controversial book Nietzsche had written in 1888 (The Antichrist). He noted in his diary that the word “Antichrist” here represented Nietzsche’s philosophy of rejecting Christianity through “moral purification by means of one’s own strength, liberation through work, worship of glorious, eternal nature.” 

But it was the paradise of physical nature that became the composition’s focus. Strauss later simplified the title to An Alpine Symphony. He outlined a program depicting a mountain climbing expedition that begins in the depth of night and proceeds through a long day’s journey to reach the summit before descending through a powerful storm and concluding with the return of night. 

Strauss’s extraordinary gift for vivid musical evocation of the natural world has caused An Alpine Symphony to be underestimated as a merely virtuosic display of pictorial orchestration—a Baedeker’s guide in sound to the composer’s beloved Bavarian Alps. The score calls for a vastly expanded orchestra, including a gigantic array of percussion (with wind and thunder machines), organ, and offstage players. While rehearsing for the premiere in 1915, Strauss quipped: “I have finally learned to orchestrate!”

But if its technical demands and scope make it the Mount Everest of Strauss’s tone poems, there is much more to An Alpine Symphony than a thrillingly cinematic depiction of the adventures of an imaginary climbing party. By referring to Nietzsche’s book—a passionate diatribe against Christianity as a distorted worldview—Strauss was situating his glorification of nature within a larger constellation of interconnected ideas. In the earlier sketches inspired by the Stauffer-Bern story, Strauss had plotted out what he described as the initial “child-like religious feelings toward the power of nature” experienced by the artist before he begins his process of “independent thinking” and liberation.

The challenge posed by nature in An Alpine Symphony was thus linked from the start in Strauss’s imagination with the fundamental existential and creative challenge of life itself—a challenge to which the artist responds by rejecting the structures of traditional faith to create his own meaning. A network of allusions to the music of Wagner and Mahler (along with quotations from Beethoven and from Strauss’s own scores) adds a musical-historical layer to those involving religion, philosophy, and the natural world. 

WHAT TO LISTEN FOR

While Strauss originally envisioned a four-movement plan, the work evolved into one monumental span lasting about 50 minutes and comprising 22 numbered sections. Linked seamlessly, these are given brief headings in the score that outline the various stages of the expedition. Night gives way to sunrise and the ascent begins, followed by a lengthy interlude in the forest, passages around a stream and waterfall (where an Alpine apparition is encountered), and enjoyment of the calm, pastoral scene of flowering meadows and roaming cows. Straying through thick undergrowth, the climbers reach a glacier and experience “dangerous moments” before they at last attain the summit. There ensues a “vision” (to music of Mahlerian intensity); with the first hints of oncoming darkness, an elegiac mood settles in. An eerie calm precedes the arrival of a violent thunderstorm during the descent. Sunset brackets the day’s adventure and prepares the tone for final reflections on what was accomplished—and the return of night. 

Strauss’s gives An Alpine Symphony cohesion through his symphonic development of a network of leitmotifs, such as a brassy, Wagnerian signifier for the mountain itself (heard in the opening minutes). The tour de force storm scene is not only splendidly “realistic” but imaginatively fragments and reconfigures previous motifs. This passage belongs to the considerable amount of music devoted to what is experienced after the peak has been reached. The remarkable “Vision” that follows is a pivotal moment. Slow music, shrouded in mists of B-flat minor and descending scales, frames An Alpine Symphony. Toward the end, funereal strains announce the arrival of night following the descent from the mountain a reminder that the creative struggle for liberation can never end but awaits us anew at every stage in life’s journey.

Scored for a very large orchestra of 4 flutes (flutes 3 and 4 double piccolos), 3 oboes (oboe 3 doubles English horn), heckelphone, clarinet in E-flat, 2 clarinets in B-flat, bass clarinet (doubles clarinet in C), 4 bassoons (bassoon 4 doubles contrabassoon), 8 horns (horns 5–8 double Wagner tubas), 4 trumpets, 4 trombones, 2 tubas, 12 offstage horns, 2 offstage trumpets, 2 offstage trombones, timpani (2 players), percussion (including a thunder machine), celesta, organ, 2 harps, and strings

− Thomas May is the Nashville Symphony's program annotator.

Featured on Beethoven's Violin Concerto — May 2 to 4, 2024

Nashville Symphony
Giancarlo Guerrero, conductor
Gil Shaham, violin

Return to Program Notes