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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 December 2021
Initially criticized for its naïve representation of landscape features, Strauss's Alpensinfonie (1915) has in recent years been reinterpreted by scholars as a deliberate challenge to metaphysics, a late outgrowth of the composer's fascination with Nietzsche. As a consequence, the relationship between Strauss's tone poem and earlier artworks remains underexplored. Strauss in fact relied heavily on long-established tropes of representing mountain scenes, and when this work is situated against a backdrop of similarly themed Romantic paintings, literature, travelogues and musical compositions, many points of resemblance emerge. In this article, I focus on how human responses to mountains are portrayed within artworks. Romantic-era reactions were by no means univocal: mountains elicited overtly religious exhalations, atheistic refutations of all supernatural connections, pantheistic nature-worship, and also artworks which engaged with nature purely in an immanent fashion.
Strauss uses a range of strategies to distinguish the climber from the changing scenery he traverses. The ascent in the first half of Eine Alpensinfonie focuses on a virtuoso rendition of landscape in sound, interleaved with suggestions as to the emotional reactions of the protagonist. This immanent perspective on nature would accord well with Strauss's declared atheism. In the climber's response to the sublime experience of the peak, however, I argue that there are marked similarities to the pantheistic divinization of nature such as was espoused by the likes of Goethe, whom Strauss admired enormously. And while Strauss's was an avowedly godless perspective, I will argue in the final section of the article that he casts the climber's post-peak response to the sublime encounter in a parareligious light that again has romantic precedents. There are intimations of romantic transcendence in the latter part of the work, even if these evaporate as the tone poem, and the entire nineteenth-century German instrumental tradition it concludes, fades away into silence.
Portions of this article were presented at the joint New Zealand Musicology Society/Musicological Society of Australia Conference ‘Performing history’ in December 2017, and to the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Study Group at the University of Sydney in March 2018. I would like to express my gratitude to Ian Cooper, Luke Fisher, Cat Moir, Dalia Nassar, Sean Pryor, Vanessa Tammetta, Matthew Werley and the anonymous reviewers for this journal, all of whom provided helpful suggestions and feedback during the writing of this article. All translations in this article are my own except when otherwise indicated.
1 ‘[Sie müßten] die Musik dafür [ … ] in der reinsten Region Ihres Gehirns zu suchen haben, dort, wo Aufschwung, reine, klare Gletscherluft, Höhe, unbedingte scharfe geistige Freiheit zu finden ist – einer Region, zu der Sie, meine ich, gern und gut auffliegen’. Letter from Hugo von Hofmannsthal to Richard Strauss, 13 September 1912; Richard Strauss – Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Briefwechsel, ed. Willi Schuh, 5th edn (Zurich: Atlantis, 1978): 199; The Correspondence between Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, trans. Hanns Hammelmann and Ewald Osers (London: Collins, 1961): 143, translation modified. Hereafter references to this source will be in the form G199, E143.
2 ‘Sein Gottsuchen, in wilden Schwüngen nach aufwärts, ist nichts anderes als ein wildes Springen nach der hochhängenden Frucht der Inspiration. Auf Bergeshöhen, in klarer, funkelnder Einsamkeit ist er gewohnt, sich durch ein Noch-höher! Noch-höher! in einer einsamen, reinen Orgie emporzuwerfen und aus einere unerreichbaren Klarheit ober ihm (welche Kunst, wenn nicht die Musik, kann dies ausdrücken?) eine Fetzen des Himmels herabzureißen, in sich hineinzureißen, – diesen flüchtigen, höchsten Zustand, diese Trance nennt er Gott …. Ich kann mir – wenn ich Sie mit Staunen hier stocken sehe – nur denken, daß die Alpensymphonie, die ich nicht kenne, hier im Wege ist –, daß Sie ein dort Gesuchtes, Gefundenes an Aufschwung, Emporklettern zu? – nun zu “Gott” – hier meiden wollen, daß Sie sich hier nicht loslassen wollen’. G199–200, E143.
3 Facsimile reproduction, transcription and translation of this Schreibkalendar entry is found in Stephan Kohler, ‘Preface’, trans. Stewart Spencer, in Richard Strauss, Eine Alpensinfonie Op. 64 (London: Eulenberg, 1996): iv, xii. By coincidence, one sketch for the Alpensinfonie was annotated by the composer as a ‘gutes Thema für Josephs Sieg’ (a good theme for Joseph's triumph). See Bayreuther, Rainer, Richard Strauss’ Alpensinfonie: Entstehung, Analyse und Interpretation (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1997): 257Google Scholar.
4 Morris, Christopher, Modernism and the Cult of Mountains: Music, Opera, Cinema (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012): 50Google Scholar. A sample of early British dismissals of this tone poem can be found in David Larkin, ‘Richard Strauss's Tone Poems in Britain, 1890–1950’, in The Symphonic Poem in Britain, 1850–1950, ed. Michael Allis and Paul Watt (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2020): 80–114, here 102–4.
5 Youmans, Charles, Richard Strauss's Orchestral Music and the German Intellectual Tradition: The Philosophical Roots of Musical Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005): 221Google Scholar.
6 Peter Höyng, ‘Leaving the Summit Behind: Tracking Biographical and Philosophical Pathways in Richard Strauss's Eine Alpensinfonie’, in Mountains in the German Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century, ed. Sean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012): 231–47, here 239.
7 Morris, Modernism and the Cult of Mountains, 50.
8 Another, more sinister, change around the fin de siècle saw mountain dwellers characterized as ‘Nordic’ (i.e. ethnically superior) German stock; this racialized view, which involved a jarring reversal of earlier dismissive and patronizing attitudes, thankfully had no impact on Strauss's tone poem. Dickinson, Edward, ‘Altitude and Whiteness: Germanizing the Alps and Alpinizing the Germans, 1875–1935’, German Studies Review 33/3 (2010): 579–602Google Scholar, here 586–90.
9 ‘Ich muß allein bleiben und wissen, daß ich allein bin, um die Natur vollständig zu schauen und zu fühlen; ich muß mich dem hingeben, was mich umgibt, mich vereinigen mit meinen Wolken und Felsen, um das zu sein, was ich bin. Die Einsamkeit brauche ich für das Gespräch mit der Natur’. Quoted in letter from Wassili Andrejewitsch Schukowski [also styled as Zhukowski] to Alexandra Fedorowna, 23 June 1821, in Caspar David Friedrich in Briefen und Bekenntnissen, ed. Sigrid Hinz (Berlin: Henschel, 1968): 235. Translated in Andreas Schönle, Authenticity and Fiction in the Russian Literary Journey, 1790–1840 (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2000): 108.
10 ‘mehr Ausdruck der Empfindung als Malerei’. Such was the description on the handbill of the 1808 concert at which the Pastoral Symphony had its premiere. In a sketchbook annotation, the composer similarly noted that ‘Also without descriptions will the whole be perceived more as feeling than tone painting’ (Auch ohne Beschreibungen wird das Ganze, welches mehr Empfindung als Tongemählde erkennen). Quoted and translated in David Wyn Jones, Beethoven: Pastoral Symphony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995): 1, 33.
11 The playbill for the first performance was slightly more explicit, identifying the emotions of the first movement with those of humanity in general: ‘Angenehme Empfindungen, welche bei der Ankunft auf dem Lande im Menschen erwachen’ (Pleasant feelings which are awakened in mankind on arrival in the country). Wyn Jones, Beethoven: Pastoral Symphony, 1.
12 A useful digest of Beethoven's own attitudes to nature can be found in Aaron S. Allen, ‘Beethoven's Natures’, in Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture, ed. Gabriele Dürbeck et al. (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017): 371–86. Thomas Grey has noted that ‘where the novel will generally convert the foreground staffage (human figures) of the Romantic landscape into individualized characters, identifiable agents, the nature of such “figures” in the symphony or overture is necessarily more generalized, abstract, schematic, less clearly emplotted within a well-defined discursive framework’. Grey, Thomas S., ‘Tableaux vivants: Landscape, History Painting, and the Visual Imagination in Mendelssohn's Orchestral Music’, 19th-Century Music 21/1 (1997): 38–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 42.
13 Caspar David Friedrich, Riesengebirgslandschaft mit aufsteigendem Nebel (Giant mountain landscape with rising mist), 1819–20, Munich: Neue Pinakothek, https://bit.ly/2KFerrp (accessed 21 December 2020).
14 After a close reading of the paired nature canvasses entitled From the Dresden Heath I and II, Koerner makes a case for these as instances of Erlebniskunst – art reflecting the artist's experience rather than objective reality. Joseph Leo Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, 2nd edn (London: Reaktion, 2009): 8–20, esp. 19–20.
15 Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, 36.
16 Caspar David Friedrich, Gebirgslandschaft mit Regenbogen (Mountain landscape with rainbow), 1809–10; Essen: Museum Folkwang, https://bit.ly/2rcyyqg (accessed 21 December 2020).
17 In Strauss's day the Alps were frequently regarded as ‘a space of masculine struggle’. See Dickinson, ‘Altitude and Whiteness’, 594.
18 Jürgen May describes a guestbook entry dated 13 April 1934 in Strauss's handwriting, where Example 1b is written out and annotated ‘the original form of the Alpensinfonie’ (Die Urform der Alpensinfonie). See his ‘Wege und Irrwege in und um Richard Strauss’ Alpensinfonie: Eine Spurenlese’, in Musik und Biographie: Festschrift für Rainer Cadenbach, ed. Cordula Heymann-Wentzel and Johannes Laas (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2004): 364–380, here 373.
19 ‘Als nun Zarathustra so den Berg hinanstieg, gedachte er unterwegs des vielen einsamen Wanderns von Jugend an, und wie viele Berge und Rücken und Gipfel er schon gestiegen sei.
Ich bin ein Wanderer und ein Bergsteiger, sagte er zu seinem Herzen, ich liebe die Ebenen nicht und es scheint, ich kann nicht lange still sitzen.
Und was mir nun auch noch als Schicksal und Erlebniss komme, – ein Wandern wird darin sein und ein Bergsteigen: man erlebt endlich nur noch sich selber’. Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen (1883–1885), in Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Part 6 Vol. 1 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1968): 189, reproduced in the Digital Critical Edition (eKGWB) www.nietzschesource.org/eKGWB/Za-III-Wanderer (accessed 21 December 2020). Translated in Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, ed. Adrian del Caro and Robert B. Pippin, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006): 121. Hereafter, references to this text will be in the form Nietzsche, Zarathustra, G189 (url), E121.
20 This photograph is reproduced and discussed in Matthew Werley, ‘The Architecture of Trauma: Richard Strauss, Salzburg, and the Great War’, in Music, Modern Culture, and the Critical Ear: A Festschrift for Peter Franklin, ed. Nicholas Attfield and Ben Winters (London: Routledge, 2018): 113–38, here 113–15.
21 An undated snapshot of Strauss in walking attire (complete with bowtie) and with a mountain in the background is found at https://bit.ly/37mllLQ (accessed 20 November 2019). Another photograph of an older Strauss in similar attire together with his parasol-holding wife Pauline is found in Kurt Wilhelm, Richard Strauss: An Intimate Portrait, trans. Mary Whittall (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989): 107.
22 William Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams and Stephen Gill (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979): 458.
23 Without giving specific reasons, Höyng agrees that ‘Strauss's Alpine tour creates a musical illusion in which the individual climbs alone toward the summit … the individual, presumably a male’. Höyng, ‘Leaving the Summit Behind’: 242.
24 Thomas S. Grey, ‘Fingal's Cave and Ossian's Dream: Music, Image, and Phantasmagoric Audition’, in The Arts Entwined: Music and Painting in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Marsha L. Morton and Peter Schmunk (New York: Garland, 2000): 63–99, here 69; also Grey, ‘Tableaux vivants’, 70.
25 See the quoted programme note and the attendant discussion in Larkin, David, ‘Aus Italien: Retracing Strauss's Journeys’, The Musical Quarterly 92/1–2 (2009): 70–117CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 91–7.
26 Bayreuther notes from his study of Strauss's sketches that the composer referred to the yodelling figures (bars 366–368) as both a ‘Hirtenschalmei’ (shepherd's pipe) and later as an ‘Alphorn’. Richard Strauss’ Alpensinfonie, 256, 327.
27 Wordsworth, The Prelude, 225.
28 Friedrich Schiller, ‘Der Spaziergang’ (line 23), in Gedichte Part 1, new unaltered edition (Hamburg: F.H. Nestler, 1816): 49–65, here 51.
29 Christof Mauch, ‘Introduction: Nature and Nation in Transatlantic Perspective’, in Nature in German History, ed. Christof Mauch (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004): 1–9, here 2. See also Dickinson, ‘Altitude and Whiteness’, 593.
30 In a rehearsal Strauss once directed the musicians to resume ‘from the Bruch concerto’. Quoted in Wilhelm, Richard Strauss, 40. On another occasion, when he was asked about the resemblance, Strauss defended his borrowing: ‘Ja, warum denn net? Es ist doch immer wieder schön’ (Well, why not? It is still beautiful). Quoted in Jürgen Schaarwächter, Richard Strauss und die Sinfonie (Cologne: Dohr, 1994): 73.
31 Bayreuther, Richard Strauss’ Alpensinfonie, 225.
32 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, First part, bilingual edition trans. Peter Salm (New York: Bantam, 1985): 132–3.
33 ‘High on the summit/of your mountains/I stand and marvel/with glowing fervour,/sacred peak,/you that storm the heavens’. Theodor Körner, ‘Auf der Riesenkoppe’, set by Schubert in 1818 (D.611). Text and translation from www.oxfordlieder.co.uk/song/2713 (accessed 21 December 2020).
34 Simmel, Georg, ‘The Alps’, trans. Cerullo, Margaret et al. , Qualitative Sociology 16/2 (1993): 179–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 180, 179.
36 Quoted in Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich, 212. Another of Friedrich's foggy mountain scenes, this time viewed from a distance, is the much later Berggipfel mit ziehenden Wolken (Mountain Peak with Drifting Clouds, 1835, Kimbell Art Museum, https://bit.ly/3mGRsfM) (accessed 21 December 2020).
37 Caspar David Friedrich, Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818; Hamburg: Kunsthalle) https://bit.ly/346M6Ce (accessed 21 December 2020).
38 ‘Wo das Herz überhaupt kräftig schlägt, wird es dem Verstand immer durchbrennen’. Letter from Strauss to Cosima Wagner, 3 March 1890; in Cosima Wagner-Richard Strauss: Ein Briefwechsel, ed. Franz Trenner (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1978): 29. Thanks are due to one of the anonymous reviewers for drawing this passage to my attention.
39 Werley, ‘The Architecture of Trauma’, 114.
40 The sketches for this passage contain the description ‘ermattetes Entzücken’ (exhausted rapture). Bayreuther, Richard Strauss’ Alpensinfonie, 259.
41 Quoted in Sean Franzel, ‘Time and Narrative in the Mountain Sublime around 1800’, in Mountains in the German Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century, ed. Sean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012): 98–115, here 101. Franzel also discusses the opposing view held by Moses Mendelssohn, who compared the sublime to a lightning bolt: instantaneous in its impact but comparably short-lived.
42 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 128–9.
43 Frederick Jameson, ‘Transcendence and Movie Music in Mahler’, in The Ancients and the Postmoderns (London: Verso, 2015): 67–128, here 114–15.
44 This name is not found in the score but an early sketch of bars 9–16 is annotated ‘das Gebirge’. Bayreuther, Richard Strauss’ Alpensinfonie, 120–21.
45 G.K. Chesterton, ‘The Hammer of God’, in The Innocence of Father Brown (1911), in The Penguin Complete Father Brown (London: Penguin, 1981): 129.
46 ‘Above all the mountains/Is peace’. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘Wandrers Nachtlied: Ein gleiches’, in Goethe's Werke: Vollständige Ausgabe letzter Hand, Vol. 1 (Stuttgart: J.G. Cotta, 1827): 109.
47 Max Weber, ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf’ (1919), in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1922): 524–55, esp. 536. Translated as ‘Science as Profession and Vocation’, in Max Weber: Collected Methodological Writings, ed. Hans Heinrik Bruun and Sam Whimster, trans. Hans Heinrik Bruun (London: Routledge, 2012): 335–53, esp. 342 (where it is translated as ‘loss of magic’, although elsewhere (352) it is rendered as ‘disenchantment’). See also Grosby, Steven, ‘Max Weber, Religion, and the Disenchantment of the World’, Society 50/3 (2013): 301–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
48 ‘Ich beschwöre euch, meine Brüder, bleibt der Erde treu und glaubt Denen nicht, welche euch von überirdischen Hoffnungen reden!’ Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, G9 (www.nietzschesource.org/eKGWB/Za-I-Vorrede-1), E6.
49 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Hymn before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni’, in The Collected works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poetical Works I. Poems (Reading text) Part 2, ed. J.C.C. Mays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001): 720.
50 Letter from Coleridge to William Sotheby, 10 September 1802; quoted as part of a longer analysis of the borrowings in this poem by Mays, who concludes that ‘[Coleridge's] account is most probably true in substance’. Coleridge, Poetical Works I Part 2, 717–20.
51 Brun's footnotes to this poem testify to her wanderings in this region. Brun's later travels (September–October 1795), which include her experiences of the Gotthard pass, are recorded in her Tagebuch einer Reise durch die östliche, südliche und italienische Schweiz (Copenhagen: Friedrich Brummer, 1800). In this later account, which is also laden with the vocabulary of the sublime, there are almost no references to the divine.
52 Metastasio's lines are taken (with minor changes) from his libretto La passione di Gesù Cristo (1730), in Tutte le opere di Pietro Metastasio (Florence: Borghi, 1832): 504–7, here 506.
53 Friederike Brun, ‘Chamounix beym Sonnenaufgange. (Im Mai 1791)’, in Gedichte, ed. Friedrich Matthißon (Zurich: Orell, Geßner, Füßli and Co., 1795): 1–3; here 3.
54 Coleridge ‘Hymn’, in Poetical Works I, Part 2, 722. Charles Lamb felt that it was this ‘thunderous and uncharacteristic repetition of God's name which most betrays its teutonic source’. See Coleridge: Selected Poems, ed. Richard Holmes (London: HarperCollins, 1996): 317. An alternative reading of the religious dimensions of the poem is provided in Lloyd Guy Davies, ‘Standing at Mont Blanc: Coleridge and Midrash’, in The Jews and British Romanticism: Politics, Religion, Culture, ed. Sheila A. Spector (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005): 275–97.
55 ‘[Ich] fühlte mich in der überfließenden Fülle wie vergöttert, und die herrlichen Gestalten der unendlichen Welt bewegten sich allbelebend in meiner Seele. Ungeheure Berge umgaben mich, Abgründe lagen vor mir, und Wetterbäche stürzten herunter, die Flüsse strömten unter mir, und Wald und Gebirg erklang … Vom unzugänglichen Gebirge über die Einöde, die kein Fuß betrat, bis ans Ende des unbekannten Ozeans weht der Geist des Ewigschaffenden und freut sich jedes Staubes, der ihn vernimmt und lebt’. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werther, in Goethe's Werke Vol. VI: Romane und Novellen I (Hamburger Ausgabe), ed. Erich Trunz (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1981): 52; English translation from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, trans. Victor Lange and Judith Ryan, ed. David E. Wellbery (New York: Suhrkamp, 1988): 36.
56 Friedrich Hölderlin, ‘Heimkunft: An die Verwandten’ (1801), in Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. 2: Gedichte nach 1800, ed. Friedrich Beissner (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1951): 96–9, here 96, 98. Translated in Luke Fisher, ‘Hölderlin's Mythopoetics: From “Aesthetic Letters” to the New Mythology’, in Hölderlin's Philosophy of Nature, ed. Rochelle Tobias (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020): 143–63, here 157–8.
57 Fisher, ‘Hölderlin's Mythopoetics’, 158.
58 ‘Tritt denn hin auf den Gipfel des Gebirges, schau hin über die langen Hügelreihen, betrachte das Fortziehen der Ströme und alle Herrlichkeit, welche Deinem Blicke sich aufthut, und welches Gefühl ergreift Dich? – es ist eine stille Andacht in Dir, Du selbst verlierst Dich im unbegrenzten Raume, Dein ganzes Wesen erfährt eine stille Läuterung und Reinigung, Dein Ich verschwindet, Du bist nichts, Gott ist Alles’. Carl Gustav Carus, Neun Briefe über Landschaftsmalerei geschrieben in den Jahren 1815–1824 (Leipzig: Gerhard Fleischer, 1831): 29. Translation from Carl Gustav Carus, Nine Letters on Landscape Painting written in the years 1815–1824, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2002): 87.
59 See Pilger im Felsental (Pilgrim in a Rocky Valley, c.1828–30, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, https://bit.ly/2WLI4x7), and the twin pictures Abendliche Gebirgslandschaft mit einer Kirche (Mountain Landscape with a Church in the Evening, c.1815; https://bit.ly/2LKuc3F) and Abendliche Gebirgslandschaft mit Flusstal und Klosteranlage (Mountain Landscape with a River valley and an Abbey in the Evening, 1815, https://bit.ly/37yL5a1) (all accessed 21 December 2020).
60 Das Kreuz im Gebirge (The Cross in the Mountains, 1807–08, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, https://bit.ly/3rhUElu). Aside from those mentioned in the text, a list of Friedrich's paintings combining mountains and Christian iconography would include Landschaft im Gebirge (Mountain Landscape, 1803, Goethe Nationalmuseum, Weimar, https://bit.ly/3pbio9g), Madonna im Gebirge (Statue of the Madonna in the Mountains, 1804, Art Institute of Chicago, https://bit.ly/34xBmiq), Morgen im Riesengebirge or Das Kreuz auf der Felsenspitze (Morning in the Riesengebirge or The Cross on the Cliff-top, 1810, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, https://bit.ly/3nHPux2), Kreuz im Gebirge (The Cross in the Mountains, 1812, Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, https://bit.ly/3h6oK6L) (all accessed 21 December 2020).
61 Bang, Marie, ‘Two Alpine Landscapes by C.D. Friedrich’, The Burlington Magazine 107/752 (1965): 571–5Google Scholar, here 572.
62 Ruined monasteries or churches are found in Winter (1807–08, destroyed, https://bit.ly/2LPAC1r), Huttens Grab (Ulrich von Hutten's Grave, c.1823–4, Staatliche Kunstsammlung, Weimar, https://bit.ly/3h4wW7A), Klosterruine Eldena (Monastery Ruin at Eldena, 1825, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, https://bit.ly/37AHmsp), and Winter from the Stages of Life series (1834, Kunsthalle, Hamburg, https://bit.ly/38iPSvs) (all accessed 21 December 2020). These are reproduced respectively in Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich: 256, 264, 266, 260.
63 See David Larkin, ‘Reshaping the Liszt-Wagner Legacy: Intertextual Dynamics in Richard Strauss's Tone Poems’ (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2006), including Appendix 1, which provides a list of the occasions on which Strauss conducted Liszt's (and Wagner's) works.
64 Victor Hugo, ‘Ce qu'on entend sur la Montagne’, in Feuilles d'Automne, 2nd edn (Paris: Eugène Renduel, 1832): 41–7, here 47.
65 ‘heitrer herrlicher Augenblick, die ganze Welt in Wolcken und Nebel und oben alles heiter. Was ist der Mensch, dass du sein gedenckst’. Diary entry 10 December 1777; Johann Wolfgang Goethe: Das erste Weimarer Jahrzehnt: Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche vom 7. November 1775 bis 2. September 1786, ed. Hartmut Reinhardt, in Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, Briefe und Gespräche, 40 vols (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassik, 1997): vol. 29, 121.
66 Letter quoted in translation with commentary in Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and His Age. Vol. 1: The Poetry of Desire (1749–1790) (Oxford: Clarendon University Press, 1991), 299.
67 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Gedichte 1756–1799, ed. Karl Eibl, in Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, Briefe und Gespräche, 40 vols (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassik, 1987): vol. 1, 322–4, here 324.
68 This six-stanza poem is the first part of his Strofen aus der Ferne (1839), the untitled second part of which begins ‘Ich möchte hingehn’, an existential meditation familiar from having been set as a Lied by Franz Liszt. On this song and its connections to Wagner, see Alexander Rehding, ‘TrisZtan: Or, the Case of Liszt's Ich möchte hingehn”’, in Nineteenth-Century Music: Selected Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference, ed. Jim Samson and Bennett Zon (London: Routledge, 2002): 75–97.
69 Georg Herwegh, ‘Auf dem Berge’, in Gedichte eines Lebendigen, 9th edn (Stuttgart: G.J. Goeschen, 1871), 68–9.
70 Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O'Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003): 120–24 (Version A, as published); 124–7 (Version B, earlier version, completed before Shelley's party left Geneva on 29 August 1816).
71 [Mary Shelley], History of a Six Weeks’ Tour through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland, with Letters Descriptive of a Sail round the Lake of Geneva, and of the Glaciers of Chamouni (London: T. Hookham, C. and J. Ollier, 1817): vi.
72 The first version of the poem, completed before Shelly's party left Geneva on 29 August 1816, differs slightly in line 79: ‘In such a faith with Nature reconciled’. This inclines me to agree with the editorial reading of ‘But for’ in the published version as having the sense of ‘Only through’ (Shelley, The Major Works, 772).
73 Sheila Margaret Benn, Pre-Romantic Attitudes to Landscape in the Writings of Friedrich Schiller (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1991): 159–61.
74 Friedrich Schiller, ‘Die Götter Griechenlands’, in Schiller's Werke: Nationalausgabe Vol. 1: Gedichte in der Reihenfolge ihres Erscheinens 1776–1799, ed. Julius Petersen and Friedrich Beißner (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1943): 190–95, here 194 (line 168).
75 Schiller, ‘Der Spaziergang’, 61, 64.
76 This was the second of three visits Goethe made to Switzerland, (12 September 1779–13 January 1780). The first trip (14 May–22 July 1775) was recounted in Briefe aus der Schweiz (available in English as Fifteen Letters by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe from his first Journey to Switzerland in 1775, trans. Bayard Quincy Morgan (San Francisco: The Greenwood Press, 1949)), while the third took place between September and October 1797.
77 ‘Es sind keine Worte für die Größe und Schöne dieses Anblicks …. Und immer wieder zog die Reihe der glänzenden Eisgebirge das Aug’ und die Seele an sich. Die Sonne wendete sich mehr gegen Abend und erleuchtete ihre größern Flächen gegen uns zu. Schon was vom Schnee auf für schwarze Felsrücken, Zähne, Thürme und Mauern in vielfachen Reihen vor ihnen aufsteigen! wilde, ungeheure, undurchdringliche Vorhöfe bilden! wenn sie dann erst selbst in der Reinheit und Klarheit in der freien Luft mannichfaltig da liegen; man giebt da gern jede Prätension ans Unendliche auf, da man nicht einmal mit dem Endlichen im Anschauen und Gedanken fertig werden kann’. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Briefe aus der Schweiz part 2 [1879 visit], in Goethe's poetische und prosaische Werke, 2, vol. 2 (Stuttgart: J.C. Cotta, 1837): 255. Translation from J.W. von Goethe, Letters from Switzerland – Letters from Italy, trans. A.J.W. Morrison, ed. Nathan Haskell Dole (Boston: Francis A. Nichols, 1881): 29.
78 Frederick C. Beiser, The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003): 174–86, here 175. See also Julia A. Lamm, ‘Romanticism and Pantheism’, in The Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth-Century Theology, ed. David Fergusson (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010): 165–86.
79 ‘[A]ls Dichter und Künstler bin ich Polytheist, Pantheist als Naturforscher, und eins so entschieden als das andre. Bedarf ich eines Gottes für meine Persönlichkeit, als sittlicher Mensch, so ist dafür auch schon gesorgt’. Letter from Goethe to Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, 6 January 1813; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Briefe der Jahre 1786–1814 (Zurich: Artemis, 1962): 689. Translation from Great Writings of Goethe, ed. Stephen Spender (New York: Mentor, 1958): 38.
80 ‘Als Dichter u. Künstler bin Polytheist, Pantheist als Naturforscher. Bedarf ich eines Gottes für meine Persönlichkeit, so ist dafür auch schon gesorgt!!!!’ Richard Strauss, Späte Aufzeichnungen, ed. Marion Beyer, Jürgen May and Walter Werbeck (Mainz: Schott, 2016): 53 (emphasis original).
81 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Bellknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007): 377.
82 Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Recollections of Gustav Mahler, ed. Peter Franklin, trans. Dika Newlin (London: Faber Music, 1980): 130.
83 ‘sittliche Reinigung aus eigener Kraft, Befreiung durch die Arbeit, Anbetung der ewigen herrlichen Natur’. Kohler, ‘Preface’: iv (emphasis added).
84 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1959): 203
85 Bayreuther, Richard Strauss’ Alpensinfonie, 215, 216, 326.
86 During the ‘Gewitter und Sturm, Abstieg’ section there are passages of the waterfall music (bars 886–890), the yodelling from ‘Auf der Alm’ (cor anglais and heckelphone, bars 900–901), the twisting figure from ‘Durch Dickicht’ (starting with the violas, cellos and horns, bars 914–916) and the Forest music (from bars 930–932). The ordering here is not the exact opposite of the initial layout. Used pervasively through this episode are the Ascent theme, both in inversion (first in bars 853–856; a later, much augmented version is found in bars 952–955) and in its original form (bars 916–917); a heroic theme first heard during ‘Der Anstieg’ (bars 862–885, originally bars 122–124ff); and a new, raindrop-like four-note figure (increasingly quickly in bars 834–846, and slowing down at the end of the storm, bars 955–978).
87 Morris, Modernism and the Cult of Mountains, 72.
88 ‘Von Wagners Weltanschauung steckt also gar nichts mehr in Ihnen. Was ist Ihnen von Wagner einzig noch geblieben? Die Mechanik seiner Kunst’. Letter from Alexander Ritter to Strauss, 17 January 1893; in Charles Youmans, ‘Ten Letters from Alexander Ritter to Richard Strauss, 1887–1894’, Richard Strauss Blätter Issue 35 (June 1996): 3–22, here 16.
89 ‘Der Jude Mahler konnte im Christentum noch Erhebung gewinnen. … Mir ist es absolut deutlich, daß die deutsche Nation nur durch die Befreiung vom Christentum neue Tatkraft gewinnen kann’. Kohler, ‘Preface’, iv.
90 The sketches reveals that Strauss had not initially intended the peak section to be so extended. Bayreuther, Richard Strauss’ Alpensinfonie, 330.
91 Transcriptions based on the facsimiles reproduced in Bayreuther, Richard Strauss' Alpensinfonie, 407, 434.
92 This strengthens the similarity to the finale of Mahler's Resurrection, where the aforementioned C major passage quickly darkens into C minor by bar 174.
93 ‘meinen abgründlichsten Gedanken’. Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, G267 (www.nietzschesource.org/eKGWB/Za-III-Genesende-1), E174.
94 Youmans, Charles, ‘The Private Intellectual Context of Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra’, 19th-Century Music 22/2 (1998): 101–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 117. In his sketches, Strauss also alludes to Faust's encounter with the Erdgeist, who tells the presumptuous mortal ‘Du gleichst dem Geist, den du begreifst, nicht mir!’ (You're like the spirit that you grasp. You're not like me, line 512). Goethe, Faust, 42–3. See also Walter Werbeck, Die Tondichtungen von Richard Strauss (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1996): 142.
95 Morris, who argues against the presence of the ‘transcendental sublime’ in Alpensinfonie, concedes that ‘even this will not easily be discarded or forgotten. In the context of German culture, nature always threatens to return with a vengeance, its siren song always threatening to lure Strauss's anti-metaphysical project nostalgically onto the rocks of idealized, transcendental nature’. Morris, Modernism and the Cult of Mountains, 50.
96 Bayreuther, Richard Strauss’ Alpensinfonie, 259, 330–31.
97 An even closer ancestor of the melancholy dotted-note pattern used in Elegie is found in Elektra (fig. 126a), where Orest (in disguise) announces the news of his own death.
98 ‘Nicht auch zürnt Zarathustra dem Genesenden, wenn er zärtlich nach seinem Wahne blickt und Mitternachts um das Grab seines Gottes schleicht’. Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, G33 (www.nietzschesource.org/eKGWB/Za-I-Hinterweltler), E22.
99 Bayreuther, Richard Strauss’ Alpensinfonie, 330.
100 Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 151–2.
101 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969): vol. 1, 256, 267; Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991): 126. On Schopenhauer's thought, and Strauss's earlier response to it, see Youmans, Richard Strauss's Orchestral Music, 59–82. Lyotard is further discussed in Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, Musically Sublime: Indeterminacy, Infinity, Irresolvability (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009): 111–15.
102 Adorno, Theodor, ‘Richard Strauss. Born June 11, 1864 [Part I]’, trans. Weber, Samuel and Weber, Shierry, Perspectives of New Music 4/1 (1965): 14–32Google Scholar, here 22.
103 Admittedly, Strauss was capable of composing sweet-sounding diatonic music that was insincere. A case in point is Jochanaan (John the Baptist) in Salome, who was deliberately given ‘a pedantic-Philistine motif’ to make him appear ‘more or less as a clown’. Letter from Strauss to Stefan Zweig, 5 May 1935; quoted in translation in Bryan Gilliam, Rounding Wagner's Mountain: Richard Strauss and Modern German Opera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014): 70.
104 Adorno, Theodor, ‘Richard Strauss. Born June 11, 1864 [Part II]’, trans. Weber, Samuel and Weber, Shierry, Perspectives of New Music 4/2 (Spring-Summer 1966): 113–29Google Scholar, here 129.