Listen to this… w and then listen to this…
Tag Archives: Richard Strauss
Strauss’s last tone-poem, An Alpine Symphony, wasn’t written until 1915 (the composer’s previous essay in the genre, the Symphonia Domestica, was completed back in 1903). There was a reason for this long gestation period (up until the Domestic Symphony the largest gap between symphonic poems had been six years). From 1903 onwards the composer’s focus […]
Strauss’s autobiographical turn of mind continued with the work that followed Ein Heldenleben. Only this time the critic-slaying hero of The Hero’s Life (i.e. Strauss himself) is transformed into a rather cuddly paterfamilias (Richard) replete with fond/nagging wife (Pauline) and yelling/gurgling baby (Franz) plus a few extras in the form of a troupe of aunts […]
Poor old dragon! While Don Quixote’s (see the previous post) heroic dragon slaying activity was tilting (at windmills and sheep and pilgrims and monks), the particular ‘dragon’ that the hero (Ein Heldenleben = A Hero’s Life) of Strauss’s next tone poem attempts to slay is an altogether easier(??) but no less pernicious target – music […]
Don Quixote, the Knight of the Doleful Countenance, here seen in Daumier’s famous painting (though it seems to me that the star of that particular show is the clapped-out horse, Rocinante – the Don’s doleful countenance just isn’t in evidence and poor old, long suffering Sancho Panza’s reduced to an amorphous blob on the horizon). […]
The final bars (in short score) of Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra; notice the key signature 5 sharps – B major. Now, while the top, treble clef, end of the orchestra is dutifully reiterating a few quiet chords in the home key (a respectable, if rather downmarket, way to end a piece), you’ll notice that, at […]
w Tricksters – nearly every culture has one (or more) lurking in the darker, mythic recesses of their skeleton cupboards: from the Monkey King to Gwydion; from Coyote and Br’er Rabbit to Loki. They are the law-challengers, the lords of unrule, the irreverent revealers of hypocrisy, the clowns and jesters. Such a one is the […]
w This five note motif appears towards the end of the last of Strauss’ Four Last Songs, his setting of Eichendorff’s poem Im Abendrot (At Sunset). It’s played at the moment – the final line of the poem – when the singer asks ‘Ist dies etwa der Tod?’ (Is this perhaps death?) The motif is […]
Of all the works in the standard orchestral repertoire, the opening that you see above – it’s Strauss’ Don Juan – must rank very high on a list entitled ‘Beginnings that Make Conductors Wake at Dead of Night in a Cold Sweat’. As you can see, it’s marked Allegro molto con brio (very fast and energetic) […]
The German Tondichtung has several names in English. There’s the literal translation of ‘tone-poem’; there’s the slightly more musical ‘symphonic poem’ and finally there’s ‘programme music’. It’s music that tells a story; and, while composers have from time immemorial been attracted to ventures into the mundane by imitating the sounds of the natural world (birds, […]
