Nietzsche influenced Strauss throughout the composer's mature career, from Also sprach Zarathustra, Op. 30 (1896), which shares the same name as the treatise by Nietzsche, to Eine Alpensinfonie, Op. ...64 (1911-15), which initially bore the title Der Antichrist, after Nietzsche's 1888 essay. Nietzsche, through Zarathustra, stresses the idea of the Übermensch, which proposes that the human occupies the stratum between the primal and the super-human. The Übermensch is not, however, the zenith for a man. The goal for man is rather his journey toward self-overcoming, his struggle within himself. In Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life, 1898), Strauss incorporates Nietzschean concepts without any direct references to Nietzsche. The designation of a man as a hero, the battle as an obstacle with which one struggles, the alternation between peace and war and the cycle of recurrence in this tone poem all reflect Nietzsche's ideas. This research considers the tone poem from a hermeneutical perspective and argues that Strauss's hero in Ein Heldenleben embodies qualities encompassing the true Nietzschean hero.
Abstract
This article examines a unique family of six-four sonorities in the works of Richard Strauss. These six-fours typically sound with 6^, 4^, or 2^ (or modal variants thereof) in the bass but ...occur immediately prior to a cadential dominant, and thus impart a sense of predominant function despite their unstable inversion. In examining how the sixth and fourth behave, I suggest that rather than hearing these chords as consonant inversions of a triad, they can instead be interpreted as accented six-fours; in other words, reading the sixth and fourth as dissonances, whose resolution to a fifth and third is deferred to occur over a subsequent harmony. I suggest that the sense of fragmentation that coalesces through the process of suspension creates a conflict between phenomenological and analytic hearings of this music, which reflects a type of modernism typically overlooked in Strauss’s late music.
The present text exposes relevant information about the elements that Richard Strauss
used to create his symphonic poems, musical genre that accompanied him during a
long period of his creative life. ...The symphonic poem The Merry Pranks by Till Eulenspiegel is analyzed, emphasizing the relationship it has with the literary work. The encounter and the recognition of literary features in music is an area that can be used to
create interest both in the music student, in the literature and in the public interested
in both.
El presente texto expone información relevante sobre los elementos que Richard Strauss utilizó para crear sus poemas sinfónicos, género musical que lo acompañó durante un largo periodo de su vida creativa. También analiza el poema sinfónico Las alegres travesuras de Till Eulenspiegel, haciendo énfasis en la relación que tiene con la obraliteraria. El encuentro y el reconocimiento de rasgos literarios en la música propicia un diálogo que puede utilizarse para crear interés en el estudiante de música, en el de literatura y en el público interesado en ambas disciplinas
Stefan Zweig, the famed Austrian novelist and Jew, colaborated as librettist in Richard Strauss' Die Schweigsame Frau (The Silent Woman) in 1935 and afterward suggested to the composer an opera based ...on Celestina. Strauss was interested and desired that Zweig work on it with him, but in Hitler’s Germany, Zweig was fearful of further collaborations and suggested that he work with Josef Gregor, a theater historian. The whole story of this unrealized opera project —almost never mentioned in Strauss biograhies— is retold here from the letters that passed between the three. We include in two appendices an English version of the ten-page sketch produced for Strauss by Gregor, and a review of operas based on Celestina in the twentieth century.
Using as an example the opera Salome by Richard Strauss (1905), which was adapted from the play by Oscar Wilde (1893), the article argues that artworks can be considered as concrete thinking for the ...same reason as myths, and even more so, because they transform myths into texts (understood as remediations of a mythic matrix within particular mediums). The article thus propounds a new interpretation of the Romantic concept of symbol, understood as a figure emerging from those textualizations of myths, each transfer of the myth from one medium to another requiring a re-symbolization. The article analyses those operations within Strauss’ opera, and then, moving backward in time, it studies the transformations of the myth of Salome through the history of its resymbolizations, which ended in making of her not only the symbol of Art, but also, as in Wilde’s version, an allegory of desire far removed from the original tradition coming from the Gospels. The article thus intends to show that thought import of the artworks is contained in the way they transform others.
The annual summer Salzburg festival is one of the most prestigious and important events in the musical world. Since 1920 the festival has been held in the homeland of W.A. Mozart and serves as an ...indicator of the socio-political life of Europe. The presence of M. Cebotari at this festival as opera and chamber singer had a very special role in her career (which could be subdivided into two periods: pre-war (1931–1932 and 1938–1939) and post-war (1945–1948)) being marked by bright artistic performances that were highly appreciated both by the public and critics. The article presents materials from newspaper reviews that reflect M. Cebotari's interpretation of the parts from the performances played at the festival. These materials, previously unknown to the Moldovan reader, have been translated from the German language by the author. Also, rare photographs from a German archive are included to demonstrate that in the summer of 1943 M. Cebotari met R. Strauss in Salzburg.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal is frequently portrayed as an aloof writer, out of step with modern sensibilities. Aesthetic Dilemmas re-evaluates his place in twentieth-century European Modernism by arguing ...that his work is not escapist but instead engages the consciousness of readers through dynamic encounters with works of art.
While Germany was ravaged by war in winter 1944, Richard Strauss read the complete works of Goethe. During this period, he composed Metamorphosen, usually considered an elegy for Germanic culture ...with its quotation from Beethoven's Eroica inscribed 'In Memoriam'. Goethe's influence on the work is far greater than hitherto realized. I argue that Strauss's late choice of title invites a search for the conceptual content of the score. Close analysis of two poems by Goethe copied out in Strauss's sketchbook, including a musical setting published here in full for the first time, reveals a 'poetische Idee' which unifies the multiple layers of meaning within the work. Relating Metamorphosen to its historical context, I interpret the work as a self-portrait of Strauss's experience reading Goethe.
The work of M. Cebotari on the main female role of countess Madlen in R. Strauss last opera “Capriccio” was an important step in the singer’s career, despite the fact that she performed it only eight ...times. The participation of the famous artist in the Vienna premiere in 1944, undoubtedly, contributed to the rapid popularization of this work in the world of musical theater, and also helped the formation of the classical tradition in the performance of the leading part by a lyrical soprano. Highly accomplished singers such as L.della Kaza, E. Schwarzkopf, R. Fleming and others are among the singers that later followed this aesthetics of interpretation. This most complicated part from the point of view of its musical, vocal and acting difficulties is considered to be a trial stage in the professional formation of M. Cebotari — the future performer of operas written by contemporary composers at the postwar Salzburg Festival.
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