Mahler & Strauss
This course analyses, compares and contrasts the two greatest post-romanticists of orchestral repertory, and will secondarily include assessments of Mahler song and Strauss opera.
Mahler’s mammoth symphonies and Strauss’s electrifying tone poems form the bulk of the course. Mahler stated, “The symphony must be like the world, it must embrace everything” and his symphonies validate this claim in their startling juxtapositions of death and sublimity, humor and pathos, the rarified and the folkloric.
Strauss accomplished nothing less than a thorough re-invention of the orchestra. Works examined include Mahler’s “Resurrection” and Ninth symphonies, and Strauss’s “Don Juan” , Till Eulenspiegel, Also Sprach Zarathustra and such underrated masterworks as the “Alpine” Symphony.
Historical context will be amply provided, and the voluminous correspondence between Mahler and Strauss will also be examined.
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