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Composing a symphonic landscape: Caspar David Friedrich's 1818 oil painting, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Wikimedia Commons

“He who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all tragic plays and tragic reality”, said the prophetic protagonist in the German philosopher Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Richard Strauss in 1918. Wikimedia Commons

Richard Strauss, who had already produced an orchestral work inspired by that book, seemingly took this injunction to heart when composing An Alpine Symphony (1915), which despite the title is better considered as the last of his “tone poems”.

The eight earlier tone poems, single-movement orchestral pieces with titles and prefaces linking the music to literature or other subject matter, had made Strauss one of the most celebrated (and controversial) composers of his day. However, although he continued composing until his death in 1949, he concentrated thereafter on opera rather than orchestral music.

Consequently, An Alpine Symphony marks the end of an era, both for the composer and for German symphonic music more generally, because after the First World War big romantic works like this went severely out of fashion. Though this tone poem was completed while the horrors of war dominated the news, it does not suggest any awareness of its larger political or historical situation. Rather, An Alpine Symphony remained focused on the representation of a landscape through music.

Tragic inspirations

Strauss first began working on what would become An Alpine Symphony in 1900, under the title “Tragedy of an artist” - a reference to the suicide of Swiss-born painter Karl Stauffer-Bern. In the following decade he set the project aside and seemingly swapped orchestral composition for opera, achieving enormous success on stage with the scandalous Salome, and the still darker Elektra, before he turned back to more accessible musical fare with the waltz-filled Rosenkavalier.

The immediate impulse for Strauss’s return to An Alpine Symphony was the premature death in 1911 of his friend, the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler. Mahler too had bid farewell to the German symphonic tradition in his Ninth Symphony, which expires exquisitely into nothingness at the end of the fourth movement.

Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No.9.

Even when Strauss took up work on the project again, its name was still in flux. He envisaged calling it “The Antichrist” (after Nietzsche’s book of the same title), since it “represents moral purification through one’s own strength, liberation through work, [and] worship of eternal, magnificent nature”, as Strauss wrote on his diary in May 1911. But when this title was dropped in favour of An Alpine Symphony, the link to Nietzsche was obscured.

Man vs. wild

On the surface then, the final form of An Alpine Symphony is a sonic portrait of an unidentified protagonist successfully conquering a mountain. By this point in his career, Strauss was living at least part of the year in the southern Bavarian town of Garmisch (today Garmisch-Partenkirchen), within sight of Zugspitze, Germany’s highest peak. Strauss loved to go rambling in the alps.

Strauss in Garmisch, Germany in 1938. Wikimedia Commons

The unbroken 50 minute tone poem contains 22 parts describing a variety of landscape features on the route to and from the mountain summit: the climber passes through the woods, by a stream, near a waterfall, across flowery meadows and pastureland, through thickets, and onto the glacier before reaching the top, each of these suggested by some sonic analogue.

Nature’s temporal and climatic changes are also prominent: the events of the day are bordered by sunrise and sunset, and the hiker encounters mist and a storm.

The composer’s customary skill at representing non-musical entities through music is on full display here: the waterfall is a particular highlight in its imaginative rendition of the water’s spray.

Strauss’ imaginative rendition of the water’s spray.

To suggest the sound of Bavarian mountain pastures, Strauss used cowbells – an instrument which had been memorably featured by Gustav Mahler in his Sixth Symphony.

The sound of Bavarian mountain pastures.

Beethoven’s Symphony no. 6 (known as the Pastoral symphony) is in some ways a precedent for Strauss’s work. Both compositions feature a brook, and later a violent storm followed by a beatific calm. Beethoven, however, claimed that his Symphony contained “more expression of feeling than painting”, and the title of his first movement (“Awakening of cheerful feelings upon arrival in the country”) bears out its focus on the emotional journey of experiencing the landscape, rather than on painting the landscape itself.

Strauss, on the other hand, wanted to represent nature in sound, but also to show the human protagonist who experiences it. In this sense, he goes beyond Beethoven in the boldness of his depictions.

Strauss conducting in 1917. Esther Singleton, Wikimedia Commons

The climber is introduced in the third section in a bold striding theme, which confidently traces a jagged ascending course – until it pulls up briefly a few bars later, as the climber runs out of breath.

Climbing the mountain.

This theme was actually modelled on an idea from the finale of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, although scholars only discovered this much later. Ingeniously, Strauss later flips his theme upside down as the mountaineer descends in haste through the storm.

The storm arrives.

In between, the climber manages to attain the summit. Here Strauss swaps landscape painting for evoking feelings of triumph that he himself would have experienced many times in his mountain wanderings.

Yet again, the opening of this new theme is a borrowing, this time from the second movement of German composer Max Bruch’s beloved Violin Concerto no. 1. Strauss freely reshapes this idea into a passage of sublime magnificence – symphonic music at its most monumental.

Playing with history

There are other, looser connections to earlier music. The opening of Strauss’s tone poem recalls the Prelude of Richard Wagner’s opera, Das Rheingold, the opening drama of his four-part Ring Cycle.

Both works start out from a place of quiet stillness, from which the music gradually grows in loudness and liveliness. The two composers were trying to represent nature in its most primal form, and the burgeoning of life that arises from it. Interestingly, when a teenage Strauss was caught out a storm in the mountains, he channelled the experience into an improvised piano composition: “naturally huge tone painting and smarminess à la Wagner”, the precocious 15-year-old wrote, being no fan of Wagner’s music at the time.

But by the time he wrote An Alpine Symphony, Strauss had been a card-carrying Wagnerian for many years. It is likely that this was a deliberate homage to the effect Wagner created – although the actual themes in both passages are quite different.

Yet another sort of allusion is found in the flowery meadows passage, where the accompanying plucked strings (“pizzicato”) and mellifluous string writing strongly recall a texture typical of German composer Johannes Brahms.

Brahms’ Academic Festival Overture conducted by American composer Leonard Bernstein.

Even Strauss’s earlier works are revisited: the explosion into life at the “Sunrise” in An Alpine Symphony is akin to one of his previous, and more famous, openings: the start of Also Sprach Zarathustra – where the prophet greets the sun. This passage has become iconic, thanks to its use in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra makes for a memorable intro in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

And finally, the opening of An Alpine Symphony, with its slow descending scales, directly quotes from the start of Strauss’s much earlier F minor Symphony. Here, Strauss returns to his beginnings for what turned out to be his last major orchestral tone poem.

Down to earth

So what do all these borrowings and allusions signify? First, they cement the picture of Strauss as heir to the German music traditions. Before he decisively transferred his allegiance to Wagner, Strauss had undergone a brief Brahms infatuation, and this, too, had left its mark. Nonetheless, Strauss did not reproduce earlier ideas in a passive fashion in his Alpine Symphony. Rather, he transformed and reworked a wide range of source materials.

Strauss in 1922. Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

More radical still was Strauss’s larger agenda, where he parts company from his symphonic precursors. Since at least the time of Beethoven, the symphony had been treated as a semi-sacred genre. It was perceived to have metaphysical significance. The writer and critic E.T.A. Hoffmann expressed it thus in a famous review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in 1810: “Music reveals to man an unknown realm, a world quite separate from the outer sensual world surrounding him.”

In recent decades, musicologists such as Charles Youmans have recognised that Strauss’s agenda in his orchestral compositions was deliberately at odds with this. He rejected these metaphysical pretensions, and his explicit tone-painting in works like An Alpine Symphony expresses a more grounded, earthly agenda. Nietzsche called in Also sprach Zarathustra for mankind to “remain true to the earth; do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes”. In nature, Strauss had found an earthly object that was worthy of worship.

A few decades later, Strauss envisaged writing one more tone poem called Der Donau (the Danube), a tribute to the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. But he never got further than the preliminary sketches.

An Alpine Symphony therefore remains his last substantial output within this arena. There are many ways to approach this work: we can rejoice in the sonic gorgeousness of its surface, or admire how cleverly Strauss has re-imagined of nature in musical terms, or hear in it a farewell to a tradition Strauss himself had subtly subverted.

It’s a more complex composition than it appears to be. And as it fades away enigmatically into nocturnal darkness, so too did a glorious chapter in German symphonic music pass with this work into history.

David Larkin ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son poste universitaire.

Current political intervention in the energy market is haphazard and disconnected. chriscrowder_4/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA

A series of dramatic events over the past year, most notably the September statewide blackout in South Australia, have revealed an electricity system under strain, and left many Australians worried about the reliability of their power supply.

In response, state and federal politicians have announced a series of uncoordinated and potentially expensive interventions, most notably the Turnbull government’s Snowy Hydro 2.0 proposal and the South Australian government’s go-it-alone power plan.

Yet all of these plans pre-empt the Finkel Review, to be released early next month. Commissioned by state and federal governments and led by Australia’s chief scientist Alan Finkel, the review is expected to provide a new blueprint for the National Electricity Market (NEM).

Clearly, Australia is struggling to manage the transition to a zero- or low-emission electricity grid, and some commentators have concluded that the NEM is broken.

In our report Powering Through, released today, we argue that it is too early to give up on the market. But what we really need is substantial market reforms, rather than piecemeal government investments in various energy projects.

Australia’s troubled transition

The problems are everywhere. Consumers have been hit with a 70% hike in real-terms electricity bills over the past decade, and there is more to come. Wholesale prices for electricity in most eastern states were twice as high last summer as the one before.

New vulnerabilities continue to emerge. The headline-grabber was South Australia’s blackout – the first statewide blackout since the NEM was formed in 1998 – but there have been other smaller blackouts and incidents too.

Poisonous politics means Australia is also failing to stay on track to hit its 2030 climate targets. The mixed messages on climate policy; the seemingly ad hoc public investment announcements; the threat of direct intervention in the activities of the market operator – all of this has created enormous uncertainty for private investors.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking: Australia has enough electricity generation capacity for now, but more will be needed in the decade ahead.

The energy market is in a difficult transition. georg_neu/Flickr, CC BY-NC First, do no harm

There is currently an acute danger of politicians panicking and rushing into decisions that will only push electricity prices higher, and make the task of reducing Australia’s emissions harder.

Already, federal and state governments are committing taxpayers’ money to new energy investments. This is premature, with the Finkel Review’s recommendations not yet released. Stampeding white elephants loom ominously on the horizon.

Given the current uncertainties, it is vital not to grasp for expensive “solutions” or to lock in plans too soon. We do not yet know what technology mix will be needed in the future. Maintaining flexibility through the transition will ensure we can take advantage of the best solutions as they emerge.

‘No regrets’ short-term reforms

There are some “no regrets” moves that can and should be made, to address the short-term risks to the electricity system and buy time to resolve the longer-term ones. Australia should build on existing low-cost mechanisms before making major capital investments or redesigning the market.

The immediate challenge is to reduce the risk of blackouts next summer, in South Australia and Victoria especially. Most blackouts happen because something in the system breaks. Some simple changes to the market rules, like the recent AEMO and ARENA announcement to pay consumers to cut their electricity use, would make a big difference to managing equipment failures when they inevitably arise.

To ensure reserves are on hand, some mothballed generators should be recalled to service. Pleasingly, Origin Energy and Engie have already struck a deal to enable the restart of the second turbine of the Pelican Point generator in South Australia.

The longer-term task

The cheapest and most effective way to reduce long-term risks is to rebuild investor confidence. That requires Australia to agree, finally, on a credible climate policy. A carbon price is the best such policy, but any bipartisan policy that works with the electricity market and is capable of hitting Australia’s emissions targets will be a vast improvement on what we have now.

The transition to a zero-emissions electricity sector will be difficult. Even given a credible climate policy, there are still questions as to whether the current electricity market will be able to meet our future needs. And that’s without even mentioning the gas market, which is frankly a mess.

Politicians should begin by adopting pragmatic market reforms and giving clear direction on climate and energy policy. At the very least, they should wait until Finkel delivers his recommendations.

Hopefully the Finkel Review will define Australia’s energy security and emissions reduction needs, and provide a strong platform for politicians to work from. If so, a competitive market will find the cheapest path to a reliable and low-emissions electricity future.

The danger is that partisan politics will make the best policies untenable. If that happens, we can expect the blame to be shifted onto the market, which will be described as having “failed” – but the truth is that it will have been systematically (if not quite intentionally) destroyed.

More likely still is that governments give up on the market without giving it a chance. Scott Morrison’s budget promise of new federally owned power generation set a worrying precedent. If recent announcements deter private investors, still more government investment will be needed, which will shift yet more risk and cost onto taxpayers.

There’s a real danger of politicians focusing on “announceables” and shying away from the market reforms that will make the biggest difference to the affordability, reliability and sustainability of our electricity supply.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

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