Strauss, R.: Eine ALPensinfonie

Staatskapelle Weimar:Wit

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Cat No: 8557811

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Release Date: 04 January 2006

Label: Naxos - Nxc / Naxos Classics

Packaging Type: Jewel Case

No of Units: 1

Barcode: 747313281121

Genres: Classical

Composer/Series: STRAUSS, R.

Description
Richard Strauss (1864-1949) An Alpine Symphony, Op. 64 The German composer and conductor Richard Strauss represents a remarkable extension of the work of Liszt and Wagner in the symphonic poems of his early career and in his operas shows an equally remarkable use of late romantic orchestral idiom. Born in Munich, the son of a distinguished horn-player, he had a sound general education there, while studying music under teachers of obvious distinction. Before he left school in 1882 he had already enjoyed some success as a composer, continued during his brief period at Munich University with the composition of concertos for violin and for French horn and a sonata for cello and piano. By the age of 21 he had been appointed assistant conductor to the well-known orchestra at Meiningen under Hans von B??low, whom he succeeded in the following year. In 1886 Strauss resigned from Meiningen and began the series of tone-poems that seemed to extend to the utmost limit the extra-musical content of the form. The first of these works, Aus Italien (From Italy), was followed by Macbeth, Don Juan, Tod und Verklarung (Death and Transfiguration) and, after a gap of a few years, Till Eulenspiegel, Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus spake Zarathustra), Don Quixote and Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life). Meanwhile Strauss was establishing his reputation as a conductor, directing the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra for a season and taking appointments in Munich and then at the opera in Berlin, where he later became Court Composer. The new century brought a renewed attention to opera, a medium in which he had initially enjoyed no great success. Salome in Dresden in 1905 was followed in 1909 by Elektra, with a libretto by the writer with whom he was to collaborate over the next twenty years, Hugo von Hoffmannsthal. Der Rosenkavalier (The Knight of the Rose), a romantic opera set in the Vienna of Mozart, was staged at the Court Opera in Dresden in 1911, followed by ten further operas, ending only with Capriccio, mounted at the Staatsoper in Munich in 1942. It was unfortunate that, in the eyes of some, Strauss was compromised by his seeming acquiescence under the National Socialist Government that came to power in 1933. After 1945 he withdrew for a time to Switzerland, returning to his own house at Garmisch only four months before his death in 1949. Strauss started the composition of his Alpine Symphony, the last of his tone-poems, in 1911, working on it intermittently until its completion in 1915. The work, even less of a symphony than the Symphonia Domestica of 1903, drew its original inspiration from a schoolboy mountaineering expedition, during which the participants had at one point lost their way, and on their descent had been drenched in a thunder-storm. An equally important source for the work is to be found in Nietzsche. Strauss had wholeheartedly embraced the latter's philosophy and was notably influenced by his attack on Christianity, Der Antichrist: Fluch au
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