Updates, Live: Richard Strauss: Eine Alpensinfonie

no copyright infringement intended
(http://ionarts.blogspot.com/2011/12/best-recordings-of-2011-8.html)

The video below contains a recording that Philips released in 1986. It had been made one year earlier, in 1985: Richard Strauss' Alpine Symphony Op. 64, performed by Koninklijk Concertgebouworkest (RCO: Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra), conducted by Bernard Haitink: one of the finest Alpine Symphonies, with its stupendous mix of dainty touches, ferocious dynamism, and lyrical tenderness (as IONARTS blog enthusiastically noted).

Despite its title, the Alpine Symphony is a tone poem, of 22 parts (in terms of formal analysis, attempts have been made to group these sections together to form a gigantic Lisztian symphonic form, with elements of an introduction, opening allegro, scherzo, slow movement, finale, and epilogue... however, it is believed that comparisons to any kind of traditional symphonic form are secondary to the strong sense of structure created by the piece's musical pictorialism and detailed narrative - wiki).

It was the last tone poem created by Richard Strauss: his great operas would follow.

The genesis of Eine Alpensinfonie was long and gathered together very different events that had impressed Richard Strauss throughout the years.

As a 14-year boy, he had been in a group of climbers who lost their way in the Alps and were caught by a severe storm. This would provide the basis for the narrative of the poem: Eine Alpensinfonie is first of all a reenactment of that adventure from long time ago.

However, another event triggered the beginning of the poem's creation. A friend, Swiss artist Karl Stauffer-Bern died in 1891, due to an overdose of sleeping pills. It was the outcome of a passionate love: he had been enamored to the wife of his wealthy patron. The affair was discovered and the artist was prevented to see his love any more. He had a nervous breakdown, tried unsuccessfully to shoot himself, and eventually it was the overdose that proved fatal. His love, Lydia Welti-Escher, committed suicide several months later.

Karl Stauffer-Bern, portrait of Lydia Welti-Escher
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(http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/ARTstauffer.htm)

Richard Strauss began in 1899 to work on a composition in memory of this tragic story. It was entitled Künstlertragödie (Tragedy of an Artist), but Strauss gave up the project and decided to use the musical material in a new project, a four-movement symphony (entitled Die Alpen), later abandoned as well. It is interesting the link that was set in Strauss' soul between the two events: the best way to express his feelings about the tragic story of love was by writing music about mountains - telling some truths about eternity, and fate, and sublime.

It was the death of another friend that made Richard Strauss resume the work, this time on a much larger musical structure that finally became Eine Alpensinfonie. Gustav Mahler passed away in 1911, and here is what Strauss noted in his journal: the death of this aspiring, idealistic, energetic artist is a grave loss.

It was again the impetus to express what he felt at the loss of his friend, by a transfer of his musical discourse towards the mountains, and this time he explained this in his journal. He needed a construction of religious kind in such a moment, and religion was for him fatally linked to a tired civilization. Here Richard Strauss was following Nietzsche: it is clear to me that the German nation will achieve new creative energy only by liberating itself from Christianity! I will come back to that, and I intend to bring the authority of Tillich in this matter.

Anyway, for Richard Strauss his Alpine Symphony meant moral purification through one's own strength, liberation through work, worship of eternal, magnificent nature (quoting again from his journal).

In February 1915 Eine Alpensinfonie was ready. The premiere was in October the same year, in Dresden.