Richard Strauss

[Wunderhorn]

Some music seems extremely smooth, while other music, like that of Richard Strauss, seems to jump around into various direction. I would love to have a better understanding of the mans music, but find it difficult to completely absorb. I think the proper execution in listening, I haven’t quite mastered. Does anyone else find Richard Strauss's music, shifting and difficult, with all of its ideas making you dizzy?

 

[rojo]

Yes, it does tend to change character frequently, in the tone poems in particular. I don`t think his music is the only music that does this though. I think tone poems by definition don`t have much in the way of clear-cut form, and are freer than other forms. I think (could be wrong) that Strauss`s tone poems sometimes describe, or portray the life, story and personality of a character. Don Juan, Till... Interesting and complex individuals, like the music.

 

[Todd]

I'm of two minds about Strauss: I love his major operas, and it is precisely the variety in the music that I like. His other orchestral works, the great Four Last Songs apart, I find contrived. He certainly displays immense compositional skill, but it doesn't do it for me. I want something more emotionally substantive.

 

[LovesBachandGershwin]

I have listnened to much strauss, but I have a recording of his tone poem, Death and Transfiguration, that is a beautiful, great listening piece.

It's 24 minutes so it's like a long and enjoyable journey to listen to, so I like to listen to it while I'm doing different things.

It's very loose in its themes, it hardly repeats so far as I can tell, but I haven't heard it many times.

I agree that his pieces can be difficult to understand, but just keep listening again and again and again, and eventually one will see the genius in pratically all pieces is my method. I need to listen to more of Strauss

 

[Sybarite]

I'm only really just getting into Strauss and the orchestral works that I've heard to thus far are, to me, absolutely stunning, although I very much doubt that I would have appreciated the music as much a few years ago.

Listening to Also Sprach Zarathustra is like sinking into honey. The orchestration is amazing – imagine, you score an organ for just one long note at the end of the first movement! And yet that works wonderfully in producing a sense of metamorphosis. For me, listening to the whole piece, I constantly have an image of humanity rising from and then above the primordial soup – no coincidence when it was inspired by Nietzsche. Indeed, it's fascinating to think of how Stanley Kubrick used the opening movement in 2001: A Space Odyssey – exactly as that, although this nod to Nietzsche perfectly sets the tone for the whole film: is Hal 'Übermensch'? And is Also Sprach Zarathustra the zenith (the 'Übermensch', if you will) of Romantic music? Like Beethoven before him, Strauss spans two musical eras – and you can hear, even at this stage, harbingers of 20th-century music, far more than, say in Wagner's work.

Eine Alpensinfonie is more obviously easy to listen to, perhaps, because there's a 'plot' that you can follow, but like Also Sprach, the orchestration is extremely lush.

 

[Art Rock]

Not the composer to start with, but defintely one to investigate if you are no longer a novice to classical music. Lush orchestrations and some real feelings. My favourite amongst his output is the late song cycle for soprano and orchestra, Vier letzte Lieder (Four last songs), which to me is of the same superb quality in that genre as Schuberts Winterreise and Mahlers Kindertotenlieder.

 

[Kromme]

He understands Nietzsche better than anyone i know...
There is not a single work of his that did not live to my high expectations when i first heard them.I love listening to him

 

[worker]

I love listening to Strauss and I do agree with Wunderhorn in that some of his stuff just jumps around for no apparent reason, in no particular direction---like a Mexican jumping bean in the sun.

It's as if the music belongs to a film score where the music is describing the action perfectly but, since we can't see the action, it sounds arbitrary.

 

[Pacific 231]

From this composer I am looking for 4 Letzte Lieder but with soprano and BRASS BAND. Does any one know if this arrangement exists? Also in score?

Thanks.

 

[methodistgirl]

I just love his music. I also like the other Johann Strauss who wrote
all of those pretty waltzes also on 2001.
judy tooley

 

[NEB]

One of his compositions I enjoy most is Festmusik Der Stadt Wien.



Here's a not so good version of it.

[youtube]n7KZT-g_KCY[/youtube]

 

[Muza]

lols, silly me, for a second there my subconscience was thinking about Johann Strauss, lols - so you can imagine my surprise when I was reading about how his music is smooth one second, and then jumps around in various directions the next

 

[Rachmaninoff]

Listening to Also Sprach Zarathustra is like sinking into honey. The orchestration is amazing – imagine, you score an organ for just one long note at the end of the first movement! And yet that works wonderfully in producing a sense of metamorphosis. For me, listening to the whole piece, I constantly have an image of humanity rising from and then above the primordial soup – no coincidence when it was inspired by Nietzsche. Indeed, it's fascinating to think of how Stanley Kubrick used the opening movement in 2001: A Space Odyssey – exactly as that, although this nod to Nietzsche perfectly sets the tone for the whole film: is Hal 'Übermensch'? And is Also Sprach Zarathustra the zenith (the 'Übermensch', if you will) of Romantic music?

You stole the words from my mouth.
The energy of this piece is from outerworld.
And the orchestration is matter of study for sure!

 

[NEB]

Don't you think some pieces get a little - well - type cast, and then become a cliche? I think that has happened with the space theme and aslo sprach. Sadly.

 

[Gringoire]

Some music seems extremely smooth, while other music, like that of Richard Strauss, seems to jump around into various direction. I would love to have a better understanding of the mans music, but find it difficult to completely absorb. I think the proper execution in listening, I haven’t quite mastered. Does anyone else find Richard Strauss's music, shifting and difficult, with all of its ideas making you dizzy?

Strauss was truly a singular genius, his works are still misunderstood and neglected even today. Certainly Richard Strauss had very litle to do with the twentieth century as we now, looking back, know it. By all the aesthetic and philosophic yardsticks that we must apply, he was not a man of our time. This is the brilliance inherent in the music of Richard Strauss - it presents and substantiates an argument which transcends all the dogmatisms of art - all questions of style and taste and idiom - all the frivolous, effete preoccupations of the chronologist. I talk here of the crucial dilemma of aesthetic morality - the hopeless confusion that aries when we attempt to contain the inscrutible pressures of self-guiding artistic destiny within the neat, historical summation of collective chronology. In Strauss we have one of those rare, intense figures in whom the whole process of historical evolution is defied. In other words, Strauss cannot be pigeon-holed. His music presents to us an example of the man who makes richer his own time by not being of it, who speaks for all generations by being of none. This is an ultimate argument of individuality - the argument that a man can create his own synthesis of time without being bound by the conformities that time imposes. The critic's of Strauss's day considered the most serious of the latters errors to be his failure to share actively in the technical advances of his time. For such critics it was simply inconceivable that a man of such gifts would not wish to participate in the expansion of the musical language. One could, I suppose, attempt a parallel with the last works of Beethoven by pointing to the fact that they too, like the last works of Strauss, follow upon a dreary desert of inactivity, from which the artists emerges to find not only the assured step of his youth but, indeed, a means to express the mature deliberation of his later years. It hold the view that the late works of Strauss afford much the same opportunity to contemplate the mating of a philisophical stance and a technical accomplishment indivisible from it. I feel that in virtually all of his late works Strauss's youthful tendency to celebrate through the techniques of art the human conquest of material order, to applaud the existential character who flings himself unquestioningly against the world, I.E., to be the hero of "Ein Heldenleben" is now sublimated, indeed, wholly vanquished, by a technical mastery which no longer needs to prove itself, to flaunt its virility -- but which has become inseparable from those qualities of sublime resignation that are the ultimate achievements of great age and great wisdom.

JSTOR has articles on Strauss. As I have an account with this site, I shall post some if anyone has any specific requests.

 

[Contratrombone64]

Absolutely adore Strauss ... own all his symphonic music in full score and a few of his operas (has cost me a small fortune). In particular, for orchestration I think Die frau ohne Schatten and Daphne are my two favourites. The metamophosis scene from Daphne is just so beautifully scored ... I can almost feel her turning into a tree.

 

[DivaDiane]

I can't really claim to know all of his music, but I would recommend starting with his vocal music. The 4 letzte Lieder are certainly masterpieces, but many of his other songs are simply gems. Try Jessye Norman's recording (I think the title is Strauss Four Last Songs or maybe Vier Letzte Lieder). Those 4 songs plus many other songs - stunning.

 

[Corno Dolce]

Ah yes,

Richard Strauss - What a masterful orchestrator! His "Tone Poems" like Ein Heldenleben, Ein Alpensymphonie, Till Eulenspiegel's Lustige Streiche, and Strauss operas like Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier, and Salome - man, such moving music!!!

 

[Corno Dolce]

Ah yes,

I forgot to mention "Also Sprach Zarathustra" by Strauss. Part of it is used to great effect in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Off topic: Here we are in 2008 and thankfully we don't have to deal with a computer like HAL that acts menacingly. Apropos HAL - HAL was a thought-construct courtesy of IBM(H=I, A=B, L=M).

 

[methodistgirl]

You are so right Corno! There are also some beautiful waltzes on that
movie.