History
After leaving the University of Munich in 1883, Strauss left for Dresden, then Berlin, where he heard Hans von Bülow as pianist and conductor with the Meiningen orchestra. Bülow performed Strauss's Serenade and commissioned another work from the young composer. This work, a Suite in B-flat, became Strauss's debut as a conductor in 1884 when Bülow informed him that he would lead the Meiningen orchestra in it without the benefit of a rehearsal. The following year, Strauss became assistant conductor of the Meiningen orchestra, attending all of Bulow's rehearsals with pencil and paper in hand. [2]
Bülow exposed Strauss to the "music of the future" through his acquaintance with Alexander Ritter, a composer and violinist who had married Richard Wagner's niece and himself had written six symphonic poems similar to those of Franz Liszt. [1] Strauss may have already been turning away from the conservative style of music, influenced by the music of Johannes Brahms, that he had been writing up to that point. Nevertheless, through Ritter he became acquainted with Liszt's symphonic poems. He soon started voicing the slogan, "New ideas must seek new forms" as central to Liszt's symphonic works, and from this point he considered abstract sonata form to be little more than "a hollow shell." [3] Strauss left Meiningen in 1886 for a conducting position in Munich, which allowed him regular evenings "to exchange noble ideas and to listen to the teachings of the Lisztian Ritter," who had moved to Munich in September 1886. [3]
Before taking up his post in Munich, Strauss spent several weeks touring Italy, during which he took his "first hesitant step" into writing programmatic music by composing sketches for Aus Italien. [3] As his duties in Munich were lighter than those in Meiningen, Strauss also had increased time to think about music and aesthetics while his friendship with Ritter deepened. He became convinced that an artist's duty included creating "a new form for every new subject" and addressed this problem with Macbeth, the piece which would become his first fully fledged tone poem. Eight months after completing it, he would write Don Juan. Its premiere earned Strauss a name as a modernist. [3]
As he continued to make a name for himself as both conductor and composer, Strauss continued writing tone poems steadily through the 1880s. He took a six-year break from the form while he worked on his first opera, Guntram, but the opera's failure showed Strauss that there was still much to master when it came to narrative in purely orchestral form. Most of the tone poems written after this hiatus are significantly longer and larger in their orchestral demands than their predecessors. [4] By 1898, he had composed Till Eulenspiegel, Also sprach Zarathustra, Don Quixote and Ein Heldenleben. [5]
Characteristics
Strauss wrote on a wide range of subjects, some of which had been previously considered unsuitable to be set to music, including literature, legend, philosophy and autobiography. In doing so, he elevated orchestral technique to a new level of complexity, taking realism in orchestral depiction to unprecedented lengths, widening the expressive functions of program music as well as extending its boundaries. [1] Because of his virtuoso use of orchestration, the descriptive power and vividness of these works is extremely marked. He usually employs a large orchestra, often with extra instruments, and he often uses instrumental effects for sharp characterization, such as portraying the bleating of sheep with cuivré brass as well as fluttertongued reeds in Don Quixote. [1]
Strauss's handling of form is also worth noting, both in his use of thematic transformation and his handling of multiple themes in intricate counterpoint. His use of variation form in Don Quixote is handled exceptionally well, [1] as is his use of rondo form in Till Eulenspiegel. [1] As Hugh MacDonald points out in the New Grove (1980), "Strauss liked to use a simple but descriptive theme—for instance the three-note motif at the opening of Also sprach Zarathustra, or striding, vigorous arpeggios to represent the manly qualities of his heroes. His love themes are honeyed and chromatic and generally richly scored, and he is often fond of the warmth and serenity of diatonic harmony as balm after torrential chromatic textures, notably at the end of Don Quixote, where the solo cello has a surpassingly beautiful D major transformation of the main theme." [1]
Richard Georg Strauss was a German composer and conductor best known for his tone poems and operas. Considered a leading composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras, he has been described as a successor of Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt. Along with Gustav Mahler, he represents the late flowering of German Romanticism, in which pioneering subtleties of orchestration are combined with an advanced harmonic style.
A symphonic poem or tone poem is a piece of orchestral music, usually in a single continuous movement, which illustrates or evokes the content of a poem, short story, novel, painting, landscape, or other (non-musical) source. The German term Tondichtung appears to have been first used by the composer Carl Loewe in 1828. The Hungarian composer Franz Liszt first applied the term Symphonische Dichtung to his 13 works in this vein.
Program music or programmatic music is a type of instrumental art music that attempts to musically render an extramusical narrative. The narrative itself might be offered to the audience through the piece's title, or in the form of program notes, inviting imaginative correlations with the music. A well-known example is Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf.
Joseph Joachim Raff was a German-Swiss composer, pedagogue and pianist.
Karl Tausig was a Polish virtuoso pianist, arranger and composer. He is generally regarded as Franz Liszt's most distinguished pupil and one of the greatest pianists of all time.
Felix August Bernhard Draeseke was a composer of the "New German School" admiring Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner. He wrote compositions in most forms including eight operas and stage works, four symphonies, and much vocal and chamber music.
Freiherr Hans Guido von Bülow was a German conductor, virtuoso pianist, and composer of the Romantic era. As one of the most distinguished conductors of the 19th century, his activity was critical for establishing the successes of several major composers of the time, especially Richard Wagner and Johannes Brahms. Alongside Carl Tausig, Bülow was perhaps the most prominent of the early students of the Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist and conductor Franz Liszt; he gave the first public performance of Liszt's Sonata in B minor in 1857. He became acquainted with, fell in love with and eventually married Liszt's daughter Cosima, who later left him for Wagner. Noted for his interpretation of the works of Ludwig van Beethoven, he was one of the earliest European musicians to tour the United States.
Ein Heldenleben, Op. 40, is a tone poem by Richard Strauss. The work was completed in 1898. It was his eighth work in the genre, and exceeded any of its predecessors in its orchestral demands. Generally agreed to be autobiographical in nature despite contradictory statements on the matter by the composer, the work contains more than thirty quotations from Strauss's earlier works, including Also sprach Zarathustra, Till Eulenspiegel, Don Quixote, Don Juan, and Death and Transfiguration.
Don Quixote, Op. 35 is a tone poem by Richard Strauss for cello, viola, and orchestra. Subtitled Phantastische Variationen über ein Thema ritterlichen Charakters, the work is based on the novel Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes. Strauss composed this work in Munich in 1897. The premiere took place in Cologne on 8 March 1898, with Friedrich Grützmacher as the cello soloist and Franz Wüllner as the conductor.
Don Juan, Op. 20, is a tone poem in E major for large orchestra written by the German composer Richard Strauss in 1888. The work is based on Don Juans Ende, a play derived from an unfinished 1844 retelling of the tale by poet Nikolaus Lenau after the Don Juan legend which originated in Renaissance-era Spain. Strauss reprinted three excerpts from the play in his score. In Lenau's rendering, Don Juan's promiscuity springs from his determination to find the ideal woman. Despairing of ever finding her, he ultimately surrenders to melancholy and wills his own death. It is singled out by Carl Dahlhaus as a "musical symbol of fin-de-siècle modernism", particularly for the "breakaway mood" of its opening bars.
The symphonic poems of the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt are a series of 13 orchestral works, numbered S.95–107. The first 12 were composed between 1848 and 1858 ; the last, Von der Wiege bis zum Grabe, followed in 1882. These works helped establish the genre of orchestral program music—compositions written to illustrate an extra-musical plan derived from a play, poem, painting or work of nature. They inspired the symphonic poems of Bedřich Smetana, Antonín Dvořák, Richard Strauss and others.
Kossuth, Sz. 21, BB. 31, DD. 75a is a symphonic poem composed by Béla Bartók inspired by the Hungarian politician Lajos Kossuth.
The Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein was a German musical association founded in 1861 by Franz Liszt and Franz Brendel, to embody the musical ideals of the New German School of music.
Macbeth, Op. 23, is a symphonic poem written by Richard Strauss between 1886 and 1888. The work was his first tone poem, which Strauss described as "a completely new path" for him compositionally. Written in some semblance of sonata form, the piece was revised more thoroughly than any of Strauss's other works; these revisions, focused primarily on the development and recapitulation sections, show how much the composer was struggling at this point in his career to balance narrative content with musical form. Bryan Gilliam writes in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians that, "New path or not, Macbeth failed to find a firm place in the concert repertory, because it lacked the thematic cogency and convincing pacing of musical events so evident in the two antecedent works [Don Juan and Tod und Verklärung ]. And despite revisions to the orchestration, in an attempt to restrain inner voices and highlight principal themes, Macbeth still falls short of Don Juan and Tod und Verklärung in sonic clarity."
The Meiningen Court Orchestra is one of the oldest and most traditional orchestras in Europe. Since 1952 the now 68-member orchestra has been affiliated to the Meiningen Court Theatre and in addition to their opera performances regularly give symphony concerts and youth concerts. The incumbent music director (GMD) is Philippe Bach.
A Hero's Song, Op. 111, B. 199, also called Heroic Song for Orchestra, is a symphonic poem for orchestra composed by Antonín Dvořák between August 4 and October 25, 1897. It was premiered in Vienna in on December 4, 1898, with Gustav Mahler conducting the Vienna Philharmonic, and was later published in Berlin in 1899. Unlike Dvořák's other symphonic poems, this work is not based upon a specific text, and it may have been intended to be autobiographical. The piece is mostly energetic and triumphant, but it includes a slower section containing a funeral march. A typical performance lasts approximately 22 minutes.
In 1882–3 Richard Strauss wrote his Horn Concerto No. 1 in E-flat major, Op. 11, in two versions, one for piano accompaniment and one with an orchestra. The horn concerto has become the most frequently performed horn concerto written in the 19th century. The premiere with piano accompaniment was given in 1883 at Munich, and that with orchestral accompaniment in 1885 at Meiningen.
New Year's Eve Concert 1992: Richard Strauss Gala was a 76-minute televised event presented in Berlin's Philharmonie on 31 December 1992, in which four pieces of music by Richard Strauss were performed by the pianist Martha Argerich and the singers Kathleen Battle, Renée Fleming, Andreas Schmidt and Frederica von Stade with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Claudio Abbado. It was jointly produced by Columbia Artists Management and Germany's Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen in association with France's La Sept, Japan's NHK and the United States' PBS, and was released on CD and Laserdisc by Sony Classical Records and on DVD by Kultur Video.
The conductor Bernard Haitink recorded works, especially symphonies and other orchestral works, with different orchestras. He made recordings for several labels, including Philips Records, EMI Classics, Columbia Records, LSO Live, RCO Live, and CSO Resound.
