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 […]
Tag Archives: Richard Strauss
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, […]
