Eine Alpensinfonie
Don Juan

In contrast to the short time it took to write Don Juan, Richard Strauss spent nearly a decade and a half on An Alpine Symphony. In its final form, the work describes the impressions of a hike in the mountains with such clarity that the score could almost be considered film music without a film. Strauss subdivided it into several scenes and gave them appropriate titles, such as Sunrise, The Ascent, or Entry into the Forest, and orchestrated them for a huge, late Romantic orchestra calling for at least eighteen first violins and a corresponding number of other strings, as well as extensive woodwinds and brass, various special instruments, like the heckelphone, Wagnerian tubas, organ, and celesta, and – along with diverse percussion instruments – offstage brass consisting of two trumpets, two trombones and twelve (!) horns.

The plan of this symphonic poem goes back to the beginning of the twentieth century. As with the previous works Don Quixote and Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life), the program Strauss had in mind was an artist’s tragedy whose “hero” this time, however, was to be a real person, the Swiss painter and enthusiastic alpinist Karl Stauffer. Stauffer had taken his own life following his imprisonment for an illegitimate relationship with Lydia Escher, a married woman who was the daughter of a railroad tycoon and daughter-inlaw of a member of the Swiss Federal Council. Lydia Escher also killed herself after being committed to a psychiatric hospital.