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Richard Strauss (1864–1949)

An Alpine Symphony, Op. 64 (1911–15)

Night – Sunrise – The ascent – Entering the forest – Wandering by the brook – At the waterfall – Apparition – On the flowery meadows – On the mountain pasture – Lost in thickets and undergrowth – On the glacier – Precarious moments – On the summit – Vision – Mists rise – The sun is gradually obscured – Elegy – Calm before the storm – Thunderstorm, descent – Sunset – Epilogue – Night

The rich subject matter of Strauss’s 10 orchestral tone-poems is drawn from a small number of recurring sources. While many are representations (some would say caricatures) of folk or literary characters – the trickster Till Eulenspiegel, the knightly Don Quixote, the lothario Don Juan and Shakespeare’s Macbeth – others, such as Ein Heldenleben (‘A Hero’s Life’) and the Symphonia domestica present an autobiographical portrait. Loftier ideals are explored in Tod und Verklärung (‘Death and Transfiguration’) and in the Nietzsche-inspired Also sprach Zarathustra (‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’). But the series begins and ends with tributes to Nature in the form of Aus Italien (1886), an impression of ‘the sight of the wonderful natural beauties of Rome and Naples’, and Eine Alpensinfonie (‘An Alpine Symphony’), completed in 1915 and charting the progress of a day’s climbing in the Bavarian Alps.

The score calls for huge orchestral forces, even by Strauss’s standards, bolstered by a (usually off-stage) hunting party of 12 horns, two trumpets and two trombones, and an array of percussion (indispensable to the storm music). Arranged in 22 continuous sections which trace an aptly arch-like form – with the central arrival at the summit forming the work’s apex – the piece is fundamentally shaped by Alpine imagery.

From the opening darkness emerges the looming mountain profile in a theme outlined by trombones and tuba. The image soon becomes clearer as the night gradually fades, revealing the mountain in the full radiance of the morning sun. Cellos and basses begin a rising march-like theme signalling the ascent, punctuated later by a fanfare: a flavour of optimism, maybe, in anticipation of the challenge ahead – or perhaps simply an orchestral indulgence on Strauss’s part. The pace is suspended with a rhapsodic entry into the forest, accompanied by gentle reminders of the task in hand through echoes of the earlier rising cello theme.

A further fanfare-burst marks the arrival at the waterfall, where spraying cascades – lit by harps and celesta – evoke an apparition of an Alpine fairy. As the image fades the climbers pause to take in the flowery meadows before reaching an idyllic mountain pasture, complete with birdsong, bleating sheep and cowbells. An initially lyrical solo horn tune is taken up by the orchestra with increasing disquiet as the climbers lose their way in thickets before the icy face of a glacier appears, prompting shrill cries from a solo trumpet. Almost at the summit, a cartoon-like episode presents ‘precarious moments’ before horns and trombones proudly announce the arrival at the summit with a grand ‘peak’ motif. Here at the mountain tip a solitary, awestruck oboe chokes in wonder at the vista, before full realisation of the grand achievement gradually dawns in protracted waves of elation, climaxing ultimately in the first entry of the organ and a gigantic statement of the mountain theme in the brass.

Mists rise up, the sun becomes obscured and then unison strings, with occasional breathy sighs from the wind, offer a sumptuous and faintly exotic Elegy. The oboe’s earlier theme of wonder is taken up in the calm before the storm and a brief reference to night – the murky sliding downward scale reappearing from the very opening – brings with it perhaps the most vivid representation of a storm in all music. Amid the furious wind and torrential downpour the climbers make a rapid descent, during which a hasty review of themes shows them passing by the waterfall, meadows and forest as they scramble to safety.

As the final raindrops subside (oboes, clarinet and plucked upper strings) the brass intone the mountain theme, majestic as ever, and the coda begins with a slow sunset. The following Epilogue begins with the sound of a church organ and proceeds to underpin a sensation of transcendental ecstasy – an afterglow following the successful communion with nature – that recedes seamlessly into night.

Strauss wrote of the Alpine Symphony: ‘I wanted for once to compose just as a cow gives milk’, suggesting a hankering for an uninhibited creative release. Without doubt the work represents a remarkably fluent outpouring, yet Strauss also had high-minded ambitions for it: ‘There is in it moral purification through one’s own strength, deliverance through labour, and worship of nature, eternal and magnificent.’ For all its easy pictorialism and winsome note-spinning, the Alpine Symphony also represents the fullest expression of Strauss’s pantheistic sensibilities.

Programme note © Edward Bhesania

Edward Bhesania is Editorial Manager, BBC Proms Publications

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