Programme notes
Speedread Richard Strauss was given a thoroughly traditional musical education by his horn-playing father, but he was soon exploring much more radical ideas. Developing his own idiom, Strauss generated innovative musical structures and dared to adapt the most controversial texts of his day. His experiments with songs, tone poems and operas came to fruition in 1905 with the premiere of Salome. This queasy biblical shocker, based on Oscar Wilde’s controversial play, appalled the political establishment: Strauss’s musical contemporaries were gripped.
Richard Strauss (1864–1949) Also sprach Zarathustra, Op. 30 1 Einleitung, oder Sonnenaufgang (Introduction, or Sunrise) 2 Von den Hinterweltlern (Of those in Backwaters) 3 Von der großen Sehnsucht (Of the Great Longing) 4 Von den Freuden und Leidenschaften (Of Joys and Passions) 5 Das Grablied (The Song of the Grave) 6 Von der Wissenschaft (Of Science and Learning) 7 Der Genesende (The Convalescent) 8 Das Tanzlied (The Dance Song) 9 Nachtwandlerlied (Song of the Night Wanderer)
Few composers mark the transition from the 19th century to the multifarious thrill of modernism better than Richard Strauss. Born in Munich, the son of a horn player, he was raised on a strict diet of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. But when Strauss moved away from home, his taste broadened considerably as he espoused new progressive philosophers and poets and the operas of Richard Wagner. His father played in the premiere of Parsifal in 1882, but Wagner had always been the subject of censure at
home. Strauss became increasingly fascinated with the composer, which he communicated through a series of intense symphonic poems. However, the inclusion of Also sprach Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche’s polemic about humanity and the world, demonstrates that Strauss was looking even further afield than Bayreuth – Nietzsche had famously turned against Wagner. Strauss was clearly undaunted by what his music could or should express. The famous sunrise with which Also sprach Zarathustra begins is founded on an elemental low C. It can be interpreted as the first music of a newly self-sufficient Strauss or as an innately classical gesture (recalling Beethoven’s great narratives in C minor and C major). As T. S. Eliot would later suggest, ‘Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future.’ After such a bold beginning, ‘Von den Hinterweltlern’ is contrastingly murky. Hints of the plainsong creed lead to a quasi-erotic hymn but, having established a balmy A-flat major, Strauss lurches towards B minor in ‘Von der großen Sehnsucht’. This is the other tonal centre of the work, an innately humane key that fights against ‘universal’ C major. The struggle between these London Philharmonic Orchestra | 9
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