Your favourite Strauss Tone Poems

[Sergeant Rock]

That would be me. I see I voted for Don Quixote, Eine Alpensinfonie and Symphonia Domestica back in 2011 - and my tastes haven't changed.

Wow! After four years, you've finally stepped out of the shadows!    Although I don't share your enthusiasm for Quixote (one of those works I admit is a masterpiece and yet seldom listen to), I heartily endorse your other choices.

Sarge

[Karl Henning]

I'm shocked. There is another vote for Domestica.    (By the way, when I listen to it, I completely ignore the program. I think that is essential to enjoying the piece.)

Sarge

What wonderful resonance that might have enjoyed on The Nameless Thread

[Sergeant Rock]

What wonderful resonance that might have enjoyed on The Nameless Thread

Too true...one has to learn to ignore that consummate manipulator 

Sarge

[Karl Henning]

Too true...one has to learn to ignore that consummate manipulator 

Sarge

Hah!

[Wanderer]

Wow! After four years, you've finally stepped out of the shadows! 

Sarge

I'd managed to miss your post, but one doesn't have an inkling to check the last pages of the Composers' section for nothing.

What wonderful resonance that might have enjoyed on The Nameless Thread

You devious agent provocateur, you. 

[Dancing Divertimentian]

That would be me. I see I voted for Don Quixote, Eine Alpensinfonie and Symphonia Domestica back in 2011 - and my tastes haven't changed. I consider Don Quixote the greatest of the lot. Eine Alpensinfonie, my second favourite, is far more profound and nuanced than many give it credit for (tantalizingly, the working title was for a time Der Antichrist: Eine Alpensinfonie - after Nietsche) and Symphonia Domestica is infectiously fun, witty and contains some of the best music Strauss ever wrote (I'm also very fond of the Parergon zur Symphonia Domestica, the left-hand piano concerto companion piece written for Paul Wittgenstein). Also sprach Zarathustra, Tod und Verklärung and Ein Heldenleben share fourth place. I don't much care for the others (although I do listen to Don Juan or Aus Italien on occassion).

Yes, I like Domestica, too. Voted just now. (Somehow I don't remember seeing this thread).

The TP that eludes me so far is Alpine. I won't stop trying, though...

[mjwal]

That would be me. I see I voted for Don Quixote, Eine Alpensinfonie and Symphonia Domestica back in 2011 - and my tastes haven't changed. I consider Don Quixote the greatest of the lot. Eine Alpensinfonie, my second favourite, is far more profound and nuanced than many give it credit for (tantalizingly, the working title was for a time Der Antichrist: Eine Alpensinfonie - after Nietzsche) and Symphonia Domestica is infectiously fun, witty and contains some of the best music Strauss ever wrote (I'm also very fond of the Parergon zur Symphonia Domestica, the left-hand piano concerto companion piece written for Paul Wittgenstein). Also sprach Zarathustra, Tod und Verklärung and Ein Heldenleben share fourth place. I don't much care for the others (although I do listen to Don Juan or Aus Italien on occasion).

Somehow I missed this thread back when. I have chosen A-Sinfonie, H-leben and DQ - in no final order, as I keep switching.  Sarge's point about ignoring the programme is very much to the point, I believe. Of course, one cannot but register the various "poetic" interpretations and be affected by them in one way or another, yet listening with open ears to what Strauss does, and how, is the essential thing. Wanderer's point about the Nietzsche title is, however, very significant - and here I append a note I wrote to a discussion board some years ago, when somebody suggested the work had no "philosophical underpinnings":
>It may cast a different light on any performance... to know that in fact the Alpensinfonie does have philosophical - and biographical - underpinnings. It was originally titled "Der Antichrist", referring to Nietzsche's polemic of 1888, representing an attempt to show how in attaining the pure air of the lonely heights of moral autonomy and leaving behind the undergrowth of Christian civilisation, man (the Übermensch) must experience the cleansing force of the thunderstorm and other natural forces symbolising the dangers of freedom. The work also has a secret hero [the projected title was 'The tragedy of an artist' MJW], the Swiss painter and passionate mountain climber Karl Stauffer, who committed suicide in Florence in 1891 after his imprisonment for adultery with the wife of a leading Swiss citizen. Strauss decided not to make reference to biographical details in his work, but it is not impossible to feel the ending as a kind of death, a "Freitod" (a free death) as one of the German terms has it - the other term, full of the "Moralinsäure" (moralising acid) hated by Nietzsche, being "Selbstmord" (self-murder, as Hamlet also puts it). Perhaps it is an occasion for a re-appraisal of Strauss to understand his sympathy for Nietzsche's words in the Anti-Christ about "the courage to investigate what is forbidden; the predestination for the labyrinth. An experience made out of seven lonelinesses. New ears for new music" - and further: "One must be practised to live on mountains - to see the pitiful topical chatter of politics and the egotism of peoples far below one. One must have become indifferent, one must never ask whether truth is useful or might even be fatal to oneself."
I found the performance I heard of the Alpine symphony by the Ensemble Modern at a series of Lachenmann concerts in Frankfurt a couple of years ago reflected the daring, the tumult, the final cession of life-spirits without all the jolly nature wonders that programme writers have been eager to plaster over the work and its tragic background.<
I might add that Lachenmann, perhaps unexpectedly, admitted during an onstage conversation that this was one of his favourite works. The 2nd part of the concert was his own Ausklang, very indirectly based upon the ending of Strauss's work.

[knight66]

A very long time ago I read in some book on music theory that any music whiich ended as it started meant that you had not gone anywhere. And in my adolesent impressionism I believed it. So, when I first heard the Alpine Symphony I wrote it off as sensational effects music. It was years before I went to a concert that included it and was bowled over by it. Perhaps it does go in a circle, but for sure there is a journey. It gradually grew to be my favourite of the tone poems.

I do feel though that Death and Transfiguration is the best of them; cohesive, concise and moving.

Mike

[Karl Henning]

There is real art in making one's way back to exactly where one started.

[North Star]

There is real art in making one's way back to exactly where one started.

Yeah, just like going to a lecture or a concert or a surgery or something and coming back home - it's as if nothing happened to you.

[Sergeant Rock]

There is real art in making one's way back to exactly where one started.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

                  --T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding, Four Quartets

[knight66]

I may have missrememberd this, but I think the Beethoven Missa Solemnis opens and closes with the same music. A little bit of a journey there.....

Mike

[North Star]

The original version of Janáček's Glagolitic Mass does, too.

[(poco) Sforzando]

I chose Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegel, and Tod und Verklärung. These are to my mind the most tightly written and least pretentious of the tone poems. Some of the longer ones, like Heldenleben, Also Sprach, and Domestica are much too diffuse and incoherent for my liking. If I could vote for a fourth it would be Don Quixote, or Elgar's In the South, which I consider the best Strauss tone poem not actually by Richard Strauss.

[Brahmsian]

Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, Ein Heldenleben and Eine Alpensinfonie were my three choices.

[aligreto]

1. Eine Alpensinfonie
2. Tod und Verklärung
3. Macbeth

Eine Alpensinfonie has always been my favourite.
Macbeth is a wonderful work.

[(poco) Sforzando]

I may have missrememberd this, but I think the Beethoven Missa Solemnis opens and closes with the same music. A little bit of a journey there.....

Mike

Not really. I mean, it opens and closes with D major chords, but I don't hear a direct allusion here.

[knight66]

I did not mean the literal end; I thought the opening phrases were used with different words almost at the end of the final movement. I will have to listen to it, perhaps tomorrow.

Mike

Nop, I am wrong, I wonder what piece I was thinking of?

Never mind.

Mike

[(poco) Sforzando]

I did not mean the literal end; I thought the opening phrases were used with different words almost at the end of the final movement. I will have to listen to it, perhaps tomorrow.

Mike

I would not say so.

[knight66]

It was the Beethoven Mass in C, the Dona Nobis Pachem at the end is to the same tune as the opening of the Kyrie.

Phew.

Mike