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Posted by Martin Walker
on December 12, 2008, 12:15 pm
88.72.254.97
Ian Lace writes: "His Alpine ascent is a nature lover’s guide without any philosophical underpinnings although we know that he was a follower of Nietzsche - as was Delius whose composition, Song of the High Hills, is very similar in tone." It may cast a different light on any performance, including this one, to know that in fact the Alpensinfonie does have philosophical - and biographical - underpinnings. It was originally titled "Der Antichrist", referring to Nietzsche's polemic of 1888, representing an attempt to show how in attaining the pure air of the lonely heights of moral autonomy and leaving behind the undergrowth of Christian civilisation man (the Übermensch) must experience the cleansing force of the thunderstorm and other natural forces symbolising the dangers of freedom. The work also has a secret hero, the Swiss painter and passionate mountain climber Karl Stauffer, who committed suicide in Florence in 1891 after his imprisonment for adultery with the wife of a leading Swiss citizen. Strauss decided not to make reference to biographical details in his work, but it is not impossible to feel the ending as a kind of death, a "Freitod" (a free death) as one of the German terms has it - the other term, full of the "Moralinsäure" (moralising acid) hated by Nietzsche, being "Selbstmord" (self-murder, as Hamlet also puts it). Perhaps it is an occasion for a re-appraisal of Strauss to understand his sympathy for Nietzsche's words in the Anti-Christ about "the courage to investigate what is forbidden; the predestination for the labyrinth. An experience made out of seven lonelinesses. New ears for new music" - and further: "One must be practised to live on mountains - to see the pitiful topical chatter of politics and the egotism of peoples far below one. One must have become indifferent, one must never ask whether truth is useful or might even be fatal to oneself."
I found the performance I heard of the Alpine symphony by the Ensemble Modern at a series of Lachenmann concerts in Frankfurt a couple of years ago reflected the daring, the tumult, the final cession of life-spirits without all the jolly nature wonders that programme writers have been eager to plaster over the work and its tragic background.
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