Eine Alpensinfonie, Op. 64, TrV233

The piece unfolds as one continuous span of about fifty minutes, but Strauss labels 22 short sections that map a day in the mountains, so listeners can follow the journey moment by moment.

It opens in darkness, low and still, before sunrise brings a broad rising theme in the brass as the climbers set out. A hunting party passes through a forest, brook, and waterfall, all painted in shimmering string and woodwind figures. Off-stage brass calls suggest hunters heard from a distance, then the path leads through flowery meadows and an alpine pasture, complete with real cowbells and a lowing melody in the winds.

The climb grows harder: "On the Glacier," "Dangerous Moments," and a passage of thinned-out, dissonant harmony mark the trek across ice and rock, sometimes losing the path. Reaching the summit brings the piece's broadest, most triumphant music, full orchestra and organ swelling together, followed by a hushed "Vision" section.

Weather turns fast: mist rises, the sun dims, and a large-scale thunderstorm arrives with wind machine, thunder sheet, and the full brass and percussion at maximum force. After the storm passes, the opening sunrise music returns transformed as sunset, calmer and more resigned. The work closes as it began, in darkness and silence, the mountain now still.

Strauss composed Eine Alpensinfonie between 1911 and 1915, his last purely orchestral tone poem and one of his largest scores, calling for an enormous orchestra including organ, wind machine, thunder machine, and offstage brass. He had long been drawn to depicting nature and personal experience in music, and the work reflects both his love of mountain hiking and, some have suggested, his response to the death of Gustav Mahler in 1911, though Strauss himself resisted a fixed program. He conducted the premiere in Berlin in 1915 with the Dresden Court Orchestra. Because of its scale and difficulty, it was performed less often than his earlier tone poems for much of the twentieth century, but it has since become a staple showpiece for major orchestras with the forces to mount it, valued for its spectacular orchestration and its vivid, continuous musical portrait of a mountain ascent and descent.