Originally posted by richardfinegold
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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)
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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