# Richard Strauss: An Alpine Symphony, Op. 64 Premiered 28 October 1915, The Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by the composer. Richard Strauss was an avid outdoorsman and mountain climber all his life. When he was 14 years old, he wrote to a friend about a summer adventure near his home in southern Germany. It began "at two in the morning…a five-hour climb, a steep three-hour descent during which the group lost its way… everyone finally soaked to the skin, trudging through a thunderstorm to find an unplanned night's lodging in a peasant cottage... the next day I portrayed the entire expedition on the piano..." In the Alpine Symphony, the composer returned to this theme from his youth. It is a travelogue of a day's journey up and down a mountain, depicted on an epic scale. It is his longest tone poem, at 50 minutes, and his largest, involving over 140 players including wind and thunder machines, cowbells, and offstage horns, trumpets, and trombones. It depicts 22 tableaux across a twenty-four hour journey: > Night, Sunrise, Ascent, Entry into the Forest, Wandering by the Brook, By the Waterfall, Apparition, On the Flowering Meadows, On the Pastures, Through the Thicket and Briar, On the Glacier, Dangerous Moment, On the Summit, Vision, Mists Arrive, The Sun Gradually Darkens, Elegy, Calm before the Storm, Tempest and Storm, Descent, Sunset, Echo, and Night. For Strauss, the mountain climb was symbolic of all human striving — reflecting his longstanding interest in Nietzsche, his climb is a metaphor for moral and spiritual growth through effort, solitude, and encounter with the sublime in nature. It begins in absolute darkness — a long, hushed night out of which the orchestra slowly awakens, single instruments emerging from silence before the full ensemble blazes into a brilliant Sunrise. From there the music follows the climber's progress with almost cinematic specificity: the brook gurgles in the woodwinds, cowbells sound across the pastures, the offstage brass call from the summit. The storm, when it arrives, is ferocious and full of surprises — the thunder machine, wind machine, and full orchestra in furious tumult. Then, as suddenly as it broke, the storm passes. The descent is tinged with nostalgia, the sunset a long golden unwinding, and the final Night returns us to the same quiet from which we began — the same music, but transfigured.