| Contents |
The private intellectual context of Strauss's early career. "The conversion": Strauss and Wagnerism ; Music and the "denial of the will": Schopenhauer in Strauss's life and work ; Strauss's Nietzsche ; Goethe and the development of Strauss's mature worldview -- Orchestral composition as philosophical critique. The first cycle of tone poems: genesis of a critical musical technique ; Eulenspiegel, Zarathustra, Quixote, Strauss: crystallization of a persona ; Absolute music, twentieth-century aesthetics, and the symphonies of Richard Strauss. |
| Abstract |
This book investigates Strauss's private intellectual life and its impact on the music he created during the formation of his worldview. The composer's works have traditionally been viewed as a product of high German Romanticism, yet the author demonstrates that Strauss's entire body of orchestral music can be read as a history of his struggle with specific intellectual-historical concerns. Exploring the significant influences of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Goethe, and Wagner on the young composer, the author insightfully establishes that the cultural convictions and preconceptions which grounded the composer's artistic choices in fact provided him with the philosophical and musical materials that formed the basis of an early modernism. Through this grounding, the mature Strauss succeeded in opening up a new aesthetic frontier devoted to optimism, physicality, and the visual. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references (pages 279-290) and index. |
| LCCN | 2004023224 |
| ISBN | 0253345731 (cloth : alk. paper) |
