From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Richard Georg Strauss (11 June 1864 – 8 September 1949) was a leading German composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras. He is known for his operas, which include Der Rosenkavalier, Elektra, Die Frau ohne Schatten and Salome; his Lieder, especially his Four Last Songs; his tone poems, including Don Juan, Death and Transfiguration, Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks, Also sprach Zarathustra, Ein Heldenleben, Symphonia Domestica, and An Alpine Symphony; and other instrumental works such as Metamorphosen and his Oboe Concerto. Strauss was also a prominent conductor throughout Germany and Austria.
Strauss, along with Gustav Mahler, represents the late flowering of German Romanticism after Richard Wagner, in which pioneering subtleties of orchestration are combined with an advanced harmonic style.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Strauss
An Alpine Symphony
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
An Alpine Symphony (Eine Alpensinfonie), Op. 64, is a tone poem written by German composer Richard Strauss in 1915. Though labelled as a symphony by the composer, this piece forgoes the conventions of the traditional multi-movement symphony and consists of twenty-two continuous sections of music.[1] The story of An Alpine Symphony depicts the experiences of eleven hours (from daybreak just before dawn to the following nightfall) spent climbing an Alpine mountain. An Alpine Symphony is one of Strauss's largest non-operatic works in terms of performing forces: the score calls for about 125 players in total.[2] A typical performance usually lasts around 50 minutes.
This piece was the last tone poem written by Strauss, a genre which gained the composer popularity in the late 1880s and 1890s with works such as Don Juan (1888), Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks (1895), Also Sprach Zarathustra (1896), Don Quixote (1897), and A Hero's Life (1897–98).[3] By the time of An Alpine Symphony's composition, however, Strauss had turned his attention away from the genre of tone poems and had become well-established as one of the period's greatest operatic composers.
Though one of Strauss's lesser-performed works (for a number of reasons, including the great number of musicians required),[4] the piece is popular enough that in 1981 a recording of An Alpine Symphony made with Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic became one of the first compact discs to be pressed.[5]
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Alpine_Symphony
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