Scribd
Upload
21 views4 pages

Ein Heldenleben Program Note

Uploaded by

samorgan1234
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
21 views4 pages

Ein Heldenleben Program Note

Uploaded by

samorgan1234
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 4

Sam Morgan

The idea of the hero is something that lives deep in the soul of every single one

of us. From when we were children we dreamed of “The Hero” in some capacity. The

idea follows us everywhere in our day to day lives permeating every story that we see in

our lives. This brings us to Ein Heldenleben, which when translated tells the story of “A

Hero’s Life”. Finished in 1898 this work is believed to be one of if not the greatest work

in Strauss’ Tone Poem repertoire. Like all of Richard Strauss’ tone poems Ein

Heldenleben is a piece of programmatic music which follows a story told through

musical motifs called Leitmotifs, made popular by Richard Wagner. The piece can be

loosely broken down into six parts or movements though the piece is meant to be

played completely without stops. Our first section we are introduced to the Hero of the

story with a bombastic and lyrical Leitmotif of the hero himself. This motif is built on an

Eb Major arpeggio which repeats all throughout the piece. After the massive opening

introducing our hero we are introduced to the antagonists for our story which are aptly

named in the second movement “The Heroes Adversaries”. In contrast to the lyrical and

full sound of the Hero, the adversaries are given a cacophonous theme that is heard

taking jabs at the hero. This leads us to the second theme of this second section, that

being the leitmotif of doubt which is heard in the low strings and takes us into our first

altercation between the hero and his adversaries, teasing the grand battle that is to

come later in this piece. After this scrappy skirmish between the hero and his enemies

we are introduced to our third character and enter our third section of music. The third

movement is often titled “The Hero’s companion” and introduces us to the wife of the

hero through the voice of the solo violin, which many believe to be a picture of Strauss’

own wife Pauline De Ahna. At this point in the story the hero has been lowered to a
level of doubt unheard of for the confident hero and is in need of the love of his

companion to carry on. Through this love scene the hero regains his confidence just in

time for the leitmotif of the “Call to War” to sound off in the offstage trumpets. This motif

leads us to our fourth movement “The Hero goes to War”. The motif that we were

teased with in the second movement returns with the full force of the orchestra as the

hero is thrown into the full fury of war with his adversaries. This section of the piece

shows the full force of Strauss’ orchestration ability as he layers the orchestra into many

different motifs all going at the same time to display the horrors of war, switching

between the hero and the adversaries gaining the upper hand on one another. Finally

the battle ends and we reach the climax of the piece with the return of the Hero’s theme

from movement one, except with a new sense of relief and confidence after coming out

victorious in the battle. This theme is the launch point for the fifth section of the piece

“The Hero’s works of peace” where Strauss once again shows off his chops as an

orchestrator as he leads us through quotations of most of his prior Tone Poems such as

Don Juan, Don Quixote, Death and Transfiguration, and Also Sprach Zarathustra. After

showing his chops as an orchestrator, Strauss eases us into his final statement of Ein

Heldenleben, “The Hero’s death”. Strauss finishes his grand work with a reflection on

the Hero’s life and lays his hero to rest with a quotation of the sunrise from Also Sprach

Zarathustra, bringing a thoughtful end to the Hero’s life. Though Richard Strauss denies

the claim that this piece is autobiographical, it is hard to ignore the similarities between

the life of this composer and the life of this hero. Both Strauss and the Hero deal with

battles with their adversaries and experience bouts of self doubt though both conquer

these adversaries and their doubts to enhance the worlds that they respectively live in.
Though we will never know definitively what Strauss had in mind while writing this piece,

we do know that he perfectly encapsulates the Hero’s Life.


"A Hero’s Life and Nietzschean Struggle in Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben." Manusya:
Journal of Humanities 22, no. 2 (2019): 151-166.
https://brill.com/view/journals/mnya/22/2/article-p115_115.xml?language=en

Del Mar, Norman. Strauss: The Man and His Works. London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1972.

"Strauss: Ein Heldenleben, Op. 40 - Orchestral Masterpieces under the Microscope."


Cambridge Companions to Music. Cambridge University Press.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/orchestral-masterpieces-under-the-microscope/strauss-ei
n-heldenleben-op40/970F510E900847808D7E5ECBFF2FCABE

"Strauss’s Heroic Self: Reflections in Ein Heldenleben." Interlude. George Predota. April 2019.
https://interlude.hk/heroic-selfrichard-strauss-ein-heldenleben-op-40-18978/

Strauss, Richard. Ein Heldenleben, Op. 40. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1899.

Strauss, Richard. Ein Heldenleben, Op. 40. Performed by Berliner Philharmoniker, conducted by
Herbert von Karajan. Recorded October 1959. Deutsche Grammophon, 1960, CD.

Strauss, Richard. Ein Heldenleben, Op. 40. Mainz: Ernst Eulenburg & Co. GmbH, 1899.

You might also like

pFad - Phonifier reborn

Pfad - The Proxy pFad of © 2024 Garber Painting. All rights reserved.

Note: This service is not intended for secure transactions such as banking, social media, email, or purchasing. Use at your own risk. We assume no liability whatsoever for broken pages.


Alternative Proxies:

Alternative Proxy

pFad Proxy

pFad v3 Proxy

pFad v4 Proxy