Tone Poems (Strauss) - History

History

After leaving the University of Munich in 1883, Strauss left for Dresden, then Berlin, where he heard Hans von Bülow as pianist and conductor with the Meiningen orchestra. Bülow performed Strauss's Serenade and commissioned another work from the young composer. This work, a Suite in B-flat, became Strauss's debut as a conductor in 1884 when Bülow informed him that he would lead the Meiningen orchestra in it without the benefit of a rehearsal. The following year, Strauss became assistant conductor of the Meiningen orchestra, attending all of Bulow's rehearsals with pencil and paper in hand.

Meiningen exposed Strauss to the "music of the future" through his acquaintance with Alexander Ritter, a composer and violinist who had married Richard Wagner's niece and himself had written six symphonic poems similar to those of Franz Liszt. Strauss may have already been turning away from the conservative style of music, influenced by the music of Johannes Brahms, that he had been writing up to that point. Nevertheless, through Ritter he became acquainted with Liszt's symphonic poems. He soon started voicing the slogan, "New ideas must seek new forms" as central to Liszt's symphonic works, and from this point he considered abstract sonata form to be little more than "a hollow shell." Strauss left Meiningen in 1886 for a conducting position in Munich, which allowed him regular evenings "to exchange noble ideas and to listen to the teachings of the Lisztian Ritter," who had moved to Munich in September 1886.

Before taking up his post in Munich, Strauss spent several weeks touring Italy, during which he took his "first hesitant step" into writing programmatic music by composing sketches for Aus Italien. As his duties in Munich were lighter than those in Meiningen, Strauss also had increased time to think about music and aesthetics while his friendship with Ritter deepened. He became convinced that an artist's duty included creating "a new form for every new subject" and addressed this problem with Macbeth, the piece which would become his first fully fledged tone poem. Eight months after completing it, he would write Don Juan. Its premiere earned Strauss a name as a modernist.

As he continued to make a name for himself as both conductor and composer, Strauss continued writing tone poems steadily through the 1880s. He took a six-year hiatus from the form while he worked on his first opera, Guntram, but the opera's failure showed Strauss that there was still much to master when it came to narrative in purely orchestral form. Most of the tone poems written after this hiatus are significantly longer and larger in their orchestral demands than their predecessors. By 1898, he had composed Till Eulenspiegel, Also sprach Zarathustra, Don Quixote and Ein Heldenleben.