Richard Strauss’s last completed tone poem is regarded as the pinnacle of his art of orchestration: “Now I’ve finally learned to orchestrate,” he himself is once supposed to have said about it after the dress rehearsal. The single-movement Alpine symphony that we know today ultimately evolved – over almost 15 years – from the original drafts of an artist’s tragedy, titled “Der Antichrist. Eine Alpensinfonie [The Antichrist. An Alpine Symphony]” up to the stage of the last sketches. With unprecedented plasticity, the work showcases a (metaphysical?) mountain hike with stops in the forest, at the waterfall, on the alpine pasture and, of course, at the summit.

Apropos alpine pastures: up to the score’s fair copy stage, Strauss envisaged a high and a low alphorn for the section “Auf der Alm [On the Alpine Pasture]” and the well-known “Duliöh” theme, though for various reasons first detailed in our new Urtext edition, these exotic instruments did not find their way into the printed version. In the new edition, the editor, Nick Pfefferkorn, reproduces the alphorn passages in small print, also adding two alphorn parts to the performance material, besides evaluating the corrections made by Walter Seifert at Strauss’s request.