An Alpine Symphony Op.64

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

An Alpine Symphony Op.64

If anyone had asked Richard Strauss in 1911 why he was attempting anything as dangerous as an Alpine Symphony he might well have replied, “Because it’s there.” There was his view of the peaks of the Zugspitze and the Wettersteingebirge from his new home at Garmisch in the Bavarian Alps. There was his lasting memory of a mountaineering expedition in his boyhood, when the party had got lost on the way up and soaked in a storm on the way down. He had attempted to set the experience to music at the time and now at last – as the hero of Ein Heldenleben and the father of the Symphonia Domestica – he had the authority and the technical ability to do it. Moreover, as a musician whose word was law in Germany after the success of Der Rosenkavalier, he had access to the orchestral resources appropriate to such an ambitious undertaking. Above all, while waiting for Hofmanssthal’s next libretto, he had the time.

As it happened, he didn’t complete the Alpine Symphony until 1915. He had interrupted work on it for the Josephslegende ballet and Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme and, besides, even Richard Strauss must have found that creating a score for not far short of 150 musicians was a complex and time-consuming business. Not content with a massive orchestra on the platform – quadruple woodwind, a brass section with eight horns (four of them doubling on tenor tuba), a percussion section including thunder and wind machines, a minimum of 64 strings, and an organ – he awarded himself the luxury of an offstage band of twelve horns and two each of trumpets and trombones. Inevitably, the consequence of such self-indulgence is that, being so expensive to perform, the work is heard far less often that it deserves in purely artistic terms.

As well as burdening concert promoters with extra costs, the composer gave his audience less help than he might have done when he titled the work: except by the most liberal definition of the term, the Alpine Symphony is not a symphony. It is a comparatively simple and masterful example of arch-form - as the diagram below, made up from Strauss’s own section headings, suggests. It starts at night (bottom left) and, after sunrise, ascends through various aspects of Alpine scenery to a sustained central climax and then returns in the opposite direction, passing through a storm before sunset and symmetrically ending at night again (bottom right).

on the summit - vision

dangerous moments mists arise

on the glacier the sun goes down

lost in the thickets elegy

on the highland pasture calm before the . . . .

on flowery meadows s

the waterfall - apparition t

walking by the stream o

entering the wood r

the climb m

sunrise sunset

/ epilogue

night night

Strauss might not have intended it as such but the opening section, Night, is a tribute to Schoenberg, whose Verklärte Nacht opens in a similar kind of darkness. Dark as it is, however, the looming shape of the mountain is discernible in the awesome chordal progression quietly but firmly outlined by trombones and tuba. With the entry of the piccolos and glockenspiel the first rays of light fall on the highest peaks and, at the top of a combined crescendo and acclerando, Sunrise radiates its glory in A major – in direct and brilliant contrast to the B flat minor of the opening bars.

The ascent

The climb starts with a brisk march in E flat major, rising through the orchestra from cellos and basses. Another theme associated with the climb – an echoing call on horn and trombones, perhaps representing the excited conversation of the climbers – immediately precedes and then accompanies the distant sound of hunting horns from the offstage band.

Strauss once boasted that he could set a knife and fork to music. He seems, however, to have resisted the temptation to stop for a picnic although, with the Entry into the Wood, the temptation music have been great: horns and trombones project a new and leisurely legato melody through a thick foliage of C minor arpeggios on the strings and birds call on woodwind. But the march theme persists in spite of some intimate poetic reflections on solo strings and, when they come to the Stream and yet another subtle reference to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, it accelerates again.

The water imagery gathers in strength as the climbers proceed upstream and, with excited shouts on horn and trumpets, come to the Waterfall. This is perhaps the most magical of Strauss’s acoustic pictures, not least when oboes and solo viola present the optical illusion (or Apparition) of the Alpine Fairy in sunlight refracted through the spray.

The march theme proceeds briskly through Flowery Meadows, with stabs of colour on woodwind against grassy harmonies on the strings, to the Highland Pasture, where cowbells ring, sheep bleat, and cowherds yodel. Lost in the Thickets, the climbers get involved in a desperately complicated contrapuntal tangle until they see a clear way up the mountainside – signalled by the awesome brass chords – and emerge on the Glacier. To judge by the excited cries on woodwind and an exalted trumpet, this is an exhilarating experience. But scrambling up a glacier does have its Dangerous Moments: shouting warnings to each other, the climbers lose their footing on the slippery surface. A solo cello, tentatively taking the march theme high up the A string, only just makes it; the others follow.

The summit

The attainment of the Summit does not bring the immediate triumph one might have expected. Apprehensive and still breathless from the climb, apparently, a solo oboe can only hesitantly express its emotions. It is not until they have taken in the situation, through a reminder of the awesome brass chords, that the climbers’ satisfaction is proclaimed in a passionate melody on six horns in unison. Even then, and in spite of a hymn to the sun in C major, the climax of the work is achieved only at the end of the next section. Strauss calls it a Vision, suggesting that the inspiration at this point is at least as much metaphysical as visual.

A massive fff statement of the awesome mountain chords is suddenly cut off and the delirium ends as the Mists arise from the valleys in wispy B flat minor scales on muted strings. The sun gradually clouds over in a weakly coloured and attenuated version of its once magnificent theme. In a brief Elegy the climbers regret its passing and, sensing the Calm before the storm, the clarinet becomes apprehensive – with reason, it turns out, as isolated raindrops on woodwind become more frequent, the wind machine is set in motion, and the atmosphere darkens.

The descent

The next section, the Storm, in which the climbers make a hurried descent, is a wonderful piece of orchestral writing. Themes and sounds representative of the various stages of the ascent are dimly observed (in reverse order, of course) as though through swishing rain, wind, thunder, and shafts of lightning. Structurally, the storm acts as a kind of recapitulation and Strauss continues the process by having the rain stop just before Sunset, which section recalls and balances the Sunrise episode at the beginning of the work.

The matching symmetry of the two halves is broken by the insertion of an Epilogue (Ausklang is the untranslatable original) but this is the necessary metaphysical equivalent of the Vision on the summit, the abiding spiritual memory which precedes the descending scales and sustained harmonies of Nightfall, a last echo of the awesome mountain chords, and a final reminiscence of the march theme, its closing interval sinking on a peaceful sigh to the tonic B flat.