The Classical Music Book

192

A SYMPHONY MUST BE

LIKE THE WORLD. IT MUST

CONTAIN EVERYTHING

ALSO SPRACH ZARATHUSTRA (1896)

RICHARD STRAUSS

T

he period after Richard

Wagner’s death in 1883

was a time of uncertainty

for German music. Some composers

sought to emulate Wagner in their

own operas; others avoided opera

altogether and applied Wagner’s

innovations to music composed for

the concert hall. Anton Bruckner,

for example, brought Wagnerian

grandeur, dimensions, and

harmonic adventurousness to the

traditional symphonic form. Gustav

Mahler expanded the form even

further, employing an orchestra of

unprecedented size in symphonies

that incorporated programmatic

elements and vocal parts.

New forms

Richard Strauss, Mahler’s great

contemporary, took a different

route with the tone poem—a

musical form that seeks to capture

the story or atmosphere of a

nonmusical work, such as a

poem or painting. The genre

was pioneered by Franz Liszt

and formed the basis for Strauss’s

early reputation as a firebrand.

Strauss’s breakthrough was the

daringly erotic Don Juan (1888), and

in the next decade he produced a

series of works that combined his

virtuosity as an orchestrator with

formal innovation—eschewing,

for example, the need for a piece

to end in the key it begins in.

Controversial at the time, Strauss’s

works were not written to be

The prophet Zarathustra’s

(or Zoroaster’s) writings about Ahura

Mazda (god) form the basis of the

Zoroastrian faith. This portrait of him

hangs at a fire temple in Yazd, Iran.

IN CONTEXT

FOCUS

From Romanticism

to modernism

BEFORE

1849 Franz Liszt completes

his first tone poem, Ce qu’on

entend sur la montagne

(“What one hears on the

mountain”), after the poem

by Victor Hugo.

1865 Richard Strauss’s father,

Franz, plays the horn in the

premiere of Wagner’s Tristan

und Isolde in Munich.

AFTER

1903 Gustav Mahler conducts

the first full performance of his

100-minute Third Symphony,

which he completed in 1896.

1917 The premiere is held of

Alexander von Zemlinsky’s

A Florentine Tragedy, an opera

based, like Strauss’s Salome,

on a work by Oscar Wilde.

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