![]() It’s longer than any of its predecessors by a fair measure, and at about thirty-five minutes its duration is roughly that of Brahms’s last two symphonies. But Also sprach Zarathustra is distinguished by its length. Death and Transfiguration has assumed a largely rhapsodic shape and Also sprach Zarathustra would follow in this direction. In Strauss’s first symphonic poems, for example, we find remnants of sonata form, while Till Eulenspiegel is shaped as a rondo. Though they were cast in a single movement, Liszt’s symphonic poems, and Strauss’s earlier ones, had tended to comprise discrete sections that to a large extent corresponded to the standard structure of a symphonic movement in some cases the sections mirrored the full four movements of a typical nineteenth-century symphony. Strauss was drawn to the notion (as he would recall in his memoirs) that “new ideas must search for new forms this basic principle of Liszt’s symphonic works, in which the poetic idea was really the formative element, became henceforward the guiding principle for my own symphonic work.”Īlso sprach Zarathustra starts from a different premise than its predecessors, in terms of both its musical shape and its program. ![]() In 1886 Strauss produced what might be considered his first symphonic poem, Aus Italien (it is more precisely a sort of descriptive symphony), and he continued with hardly a break through the series of compositions that many feel represent the genre at its height: Macbeth (1886-88), Don Juan (1888-89), Death and Transfiguration (also 1888-89), Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks (1894-95), Also sprach Zarathustra (1895-96), Don Quixote (1896-97), Ein Heldenleben (1897-98), and Symphonia domestica (1902-03), with An Alpine Symphony (1911-15) arriving as a late pendant. The idea proved popular throughout Europe and in America, and the repertory grew quickly thanks to contributions by such composers as Smetana, Dvořák, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Saint-Saëns, Franck, and-most impressively of all-Richard Strauss. As time went by, composers would find subjects for their symphonic poems from paintings or other visual artworks, but in any case from non-musical germs. ![]() This he did through a dozen single-movement orchestral works composed in the 1840s and ’50s that drew inspiration from literary sources. THE BACKSTORY The idea of the symphonic poem may trace its ancestry to the dramatic or depictive overtures of the early nineteenth century (such as Mendelssohn’s Fingal’s Cave or Berlioz’s Waverley), but it was left for Franz Liszt to mold it into a clearly defined genre. INSTRUMENTATION: 3 flutes and piccolo (with 3rd flute doubling second piccolo), 3 oboes and English horn, 2 clarinets plus E-flat clarinet and bass clarinet, 3 bassoons and contrabassoon, 6 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, 2 bass tubas, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, triangle, glockenspiel, deep bell in E-flat, 2 harps, organ, and strings ![]() Theodore Thomas conducted the Chicago Orchestra (now the Chicago Symphony) The composer led the Frankfurt City Orchestra in a Museum Society Concert in Frankfurt am Main DIED: September 8, 1949, in Garmisch, GermanyĬOMPOSED: Between February 4, 1895, and Augin Munich
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