Prom 27: Saariaho / W.A. Mozart / R. Strauss, BBC SO, Aalto / Karttunen / Oramo

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  • edashtav
    Full Member
    • Jul 2012
    • 3670

    #16
    Originally posted by richardfinegold View Post
    Where is Alpie?
    I didn’t get the part in Edash post about Mahler dying and Strauss therefore concluding that Christianity was doomed(?). And what does any of that have to do with the Alpine Symphony?

    I know that there was fierce competition for the American premier, but in 1915 there was considerable anti German sentiment in the US as Germany was seen as the aggressor in WWI. I wonder if any of that affected Strauss over here
    I can't tell you where is Alpie.

    Sorry, Richard,that I truncated the story about Richard and Christianity. This should clarify the subject:
    " The plan [ to write an Alpine Symphony ] was dropped and lay dormant until 1911, the year of Gustav Mahler’s death. Strauss deeply admired Mahler’s work as a conductor and a composer, but simply could not understand why an artist of his caliber could remain attached to metaphysics, more specifically, Christianity. On the day he learned of Mahler’s death (1911), he wrote in his diary:
    The death of this aspiring, idealistic, energetic artist [is] a grave loss … Mahler, the Jew, could achieve elevation in Christianity. As an old man the hero Wagner returned to it under the influence of Schopenhauer. It is clear to me that the German nation will achieve new creative energy only by liberating itself from Christianity … I shall call my alpine symphony: Der Antichrist, since it represents: moral purification through one’s own strength, liberation through work, worship of eternal, magnificent nature.


    Strauss’s disappointment in Mahler’s metaphysical leanings was lifelong, but it had reached a high point a year before Mahler’s death when he attended the world premiere of his Eighth Symphony in Munich. The Eighth is less a symphony than an oratorio based on the hymn “Veni Creator Spiritus” and a selection from Goethe’s Faust, Part Two; Strauss’s Alpine Symphony, as he would come to call it, was in part a response to Mahler’s sacred symphony. The Antichrist is a book by Nietzsche, published in 1895, a year before Strauss’s tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra, which was itself a response to Nietzsche’s eponymous earlier book.

    The setting for Strauss’s new work is the Alps, and the struggle between artist and his natural surroundings plays a fundamental role in the shaping of this work. The parallels between An Artist’s Tragedy, Also sprach Zarathustra, and Ein Heldenleben are obvious (the struggles with nature and self-doubt), but less obvious and equally compelling is the connection with Strauss’s earlier Wandrers Sturmlied (“Wanderer’s Storm Song,” by Goethe), where in a raging storm the poet wanders, thinking of his former love, asking not God but Genius to protect him from the forces of nature.

    After Mahler’s death Strauss worked more extensively on his Antichrist symphony, incorporating important elements of the Artist’s Tragedy, especially the music for the opening at sunrise. The work was completed in short score by 1913 and in full score by 1915, and, as in Zarathustra, Strauss does not portray the finite Individual jealous of eternal Nature (as did Mahler in The Song of the Earth) but rather one who celebrates—who is inspired to do great deeds—by his natural environment. In an unpublished diary entry on the Alpensinfonie, shortly after its premiere, Strauss again stresses that both Judaism and Christianity—in short, metaphysics—are unhealthy and unproductive; they are incapable of embracing Nature as a primary, life-affirming source."
    The Histjory above is part of an article on Wikipedia,UK. (Ed)
    Last edited by edashtav; 10-08-24, 21:25.

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    • oliver sudden
      Full Member
      • Feb 2024
      • 615

      #17
      I forget who it was that said ‘Mahler was looking for God, Bruckner had found him, Strauss never began the search’…

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      • Serial_Apologist
        Full Member
        • Dec 2010
        • 37694

        #18
        Originally posted by bluestateprommer View Post

        Got it, thanks for the confirmation. For those who left early, presumably satisfied with having seen S-JC that evening, obviously their loss to have missed the Strauss. But I guess that as long as the RAH and The Proms sold tickets, what each individual audience member does is up to him/her from that point on.



        Indeed, a fine reading of the Strauss, where I surmised that the off-stage brass were in the Gallery, from the sound balance. I hope that the newbies who did stay realized what a sonic treat they got in the second half. Your interpretation of the cowbells stumbling about is a new one to me, and actually sounds like a great way to interpret that passage :) .
        I wonder if Strauss got that idea of desultory cowbells from the quiet passage midway through Movt 2 in Mahler 7

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        • LMcD
          Full Member
          • Sep 2017
          • 8477

          #19
          Originally posted by Serial_Apologist View Post

          I wonder if Strauss got that idea of desultory cowbells from the quiet passage midway through Movt 2 in Mahler 7
          ... or in the Andante of the 6th?

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          • Serial_Apologist
            Full Member
            • Dec 2010
            • 37694

            #20
            Originally posted by oliver sudden View Post
            I forget who it was that said ‘Mahler was looking for God, Bruckner had found him, Strauss never began the search’…
            All that defensive overcoming and needing to conquer stuff! Mahler's wander via the byways of Eastern mysticism seems so much more enlightening and potentially liberating for the overburdened Western conscience, one may feel... as one may also Holst's, and Eliot's too for that matter.

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            • Serial_Apologist
              Full Member
              • Dec 2010
              • 37694

              #21
              Originally posted by LMcD View Post

              ... or in the Andante of the 6th?
              Yes, also quite possible.

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              • LMcD
                Full Member
                • Sep 2017
                • 8477

                #22
                Originally posted by Serial_Apologist View Post

                Yes, also quite possible.
                If we MUST have single movements from Mahler symphonies, it would make a welcome change from the Adagietto of the 5th.

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                • Serial_Apologist
                  Full Member
                  • Dec 2010
                  • 37694

                  #23
                  Originally posted by LMcD View Post

                  If we MUST have single movements from Mahler symphonies, it would make a welcome change from the Adagietto of the 5th.


                  But anybody who had seen Death in Venice (film not opera) would not recognise it!

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                  • oliver sudden
                    Full Member
                    • Feb 2024
                    • 615

                    #24
                    Originally posted by LMcD View Post

                    ... or in the Andante of the 6th?
                    They already appear in the first movement, no need to wait for the second!

                    There’s an important difference though… Mahler uses them as symbols for distancing from human concerns and tries to pretend that they don’t have programmatic meaning whereas for Strauss it’s A HERD OF COWS, GET OVER YOURSELVES

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                    • Keraulophone
                      Full Member
                      • Nov 2010
                      • 1945

                      #25
                      Originally posted by edashtav View Post
                      I truncated the story about Richard and Christianity. This should clarify the subject:
                      Fascinating. Thank you, edashtav.

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                      • silvestrione
                        Full Member
                        • Jan 2011
                        • 1708

                        #26
                        Originally posted by Serial_Apologist View Post

                        All that defensive overcoming and needing to conquer stuff! Mahler's wander via the byways of Eastern mysticism seems so much more enlightening and potentially liberating for the overburdened Western conscience, one may feel... as one may also Holst's, and Eliot's too for that matter.
                        Brief but very suggestive! Thanks...I'd want to add Rubbra, and perhaps Tippett, and - lots of others.

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                        • EnemyoftheStoat
                          Full Member
                          • Nov 2010
                          • 1132

                          #27
                          Originally posted by oliver sudden View Post

                          They already appear in the first movement, no need to wait for the second!

                          There’s an important difference though… Mahler uses them as symbols for distancing from human concerns and tries to pretend that they don’t have programmatic meaning whereas for Strauss it’s A HERD OF COWS, GET OVER YOURSELVES
                          Brilliant! But dead right too.

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                          • Master Jacques
                            Full Member
                            • Feb 2012
                            • 1883

                            #28
                            Originally posted by Serial_Apologist View Post
                            Mahler's wander via the byways of Eastern mysticism seems so much more enlightening and potentially liberating for the overburdened Western conscience, one may feel...
                            Mahler and "Eastern mysticism"? A baffling idea for me. I know about his friendship with Rückert, but I don't think that poet's orientalism influences Mahler's music, does it? And of course Das Lied von der Erde is as Western a work as they come - Chinese poetry, translated through a Judao-Christian prism, with music to match. There's no transcendence there, only the poignant sense of human tragedy: 'the earth' is all we've got, before, during and after life. Was there ever a more rhetorically "Western" work (or composer) than this?

                            That for me is the difference with Holst, who (as you hint) enters into Eastern mysticism with an imaginative grasp of its essential difference, something of which Mahler could not have conceived - even if he'd been interested in doing so. We get - from so much of Holst's music - a sense of different worlds of being which is very rare in any art.

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                            • Master Jacques
                              Full Member
                              • Feb 2012
                              • 1883

                              #29
                              Originally posted by silvestrione View Post

                              Brief but very suggestive! Thanks...I'd want to add Rubbra, and perhaps Tippett, and - lots of others.
                              Rubbra, for sure. I don't know about Tippett, whose mysticism is of the quintessentially English kind, emanating from Avebury rather than Kamakura.

                              Comment

                              • Ein Heldenleben
                                Full Member
                                • Apr 2014
                                • 6786

                                #30
                                Originally posted by Master Jacques View Post
                                Mahler and "Eastern mysticism"? A baffling idea for me. I know about his friendship with Rückert, but I don't think that poet's orientalism influences Mahler's music, does it? And of course Das Lied von der Erde is as Western a work as they come - Chinese poetry, translated through a Judao-Christian prism, with music to match. There's no transcendence there, only the poignant sense of human tragedy: 'the earth' is all we've got, before, during and after life. Was there ever a more rhetorically "Western" work (or composer) than this?

                                That for me is the difference with Holst, who (as you hint) enters into Eastern mysticism with an imaginative grasp of its essential difference, something of which Mahler could not have conceived - even if he'd been interested in doing so. We get - from so much of Holst's music - a sense of different worlds of being which is very rare in any art.
                                Interesting that in both Das Lied and Ein Alpensinfonie in the end it’s all about the Berg.

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