Strauss: An Alpine Symphony.(Sound recording review)

Strauss: An Alpine Symphony. Antoni Wit, Staatskapelle Weimar. Naxos 8.557811.

Following his writing a succession of popular, big-scale tone poems like Don Juan, Tod und Verklarung (Death and Transfiguration), Don Quixote, Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life), and Also sprach Zarathustra, Richard Strauss ended his love affair with the genre in 1915 with An Alpine Symphony. For some critics, it has always been a low spot in the composer's tone-poem output, no more than a glorified post card from the Alps. But I have always found it a fascinating journey, and, besides, the writer of the CD booklet notes says it has a lot more intellectual and philosophical substance than most of us were led to believe. Yeah, well, believe what you like, the music still sounds grand.

Strauss began writing the work in 1911 and completed it several years later, devoting his final thirty-plus years mainly to smaller works, songs, and, of course, opera. Supposedly, the composer was inspired to write the Alpine Symphony while viewing the Bavarian mountains behind his house, mountains he used to climb and enjoy in his youth. But Keith Anderson in the booklet says it is also about Nietzsche's ideas of the freedom of Nature and liberation from the outdated chains of Christianity, plus something about a marital affair and an eventual suicide. Whatever. I just like the music.

As you know, the piece is the musical account of a mountain climb, starting in the morning with sunrise, ascending through the woods, by a ...