About this Piece

In 1911, Richard Strauss reinvented himself. The “modernist” behind operas Salome and Elektra forged a more subtle and wry style with Der Rosenkavalier, an affectionate backward glance at those other waltzing Strausses of Vienna. Yet he felt the itch to return to an earlier style of his turn-of-the-century Wagner-inspired tone poems. He scratched that itch with the grandiloquent Alpine Symphony. He first developed the idea of a tone poem set in the Alps in 1899 but began composing it in earnest the same year Rosenkavalier premiered, finishing its orchestration in 1915, during a break in work on his seventh opera, Die Frau ohne Schatten.

Strauss was an avid outdoorsman from his earliest days, particularly partial to mountain trekking, as the 14-year-old wrote to another boy composer, Ludwig Thuille, in an 1878 letter in which Strauss describes a summer jaunt that began “at two in the morning…a five-hour climb, a steep three-hour descent during which the group lost its way… everyone finally soaked to the skin, trudging through a thunderstorm to find an unplanned night’s lodging in a peasant cottage.” The postscript continued, “the next day I portrayed the entire expedition on the piano. Naturally, an enormous tone painting and the whole hash à la Wagner.”

Strauss may not have reheated this youthful hash (the piano sketches do not survive), but the inspiration for a blockbuster had clearly been sown. Eine Alpensinfonie (An Alpine Symphony) is the longest and loudest of Strauss’ tone poems, employing some 150 musicians, including a gaggle of offstage brass. Not unexpectedly, an equally virtuosic employment of those forces at times creates chamber-like effects. Comparisons to Mahler and his alternations of the grandiose and intimate within a large ensemble should, however, not be exaggerated. Mahler, who died the year before the Alpine Symphony was begun, deals in intensely varied personal psychological states in his creations, while Strauss’ mighty mountain piece is simply a gorgeously colored, consistently engaging musical travelogue with each of its 22 connected sections bearing a programmatic title: “Night” (the opening and closing sections), “Sunrise,” “The Ascent,” “ Wandering Near the Stream,” “At the Summit,” “Thunder and Storm,” and so on.

The Dresden Court Orchestra, under the composer’s baton, introduced An Alpine Symphony to the world in Berlin on October 28, 1915. —Herbert Glass