15 Pieces of Classical Music About Mountains

 By Emily E. Hogstad

Mountains have intimidated and inspired humanity for centuries…and that goes for composers, too!

Some fabulous classical music has been written over the centuries about mountains, travels up and across mountains, the unique natural phenomena found in mountains, and more.

Get ready: we’re about to climb the mountain of classical music about mountains!

Slovakia’s Tatra Mountains

Johannes Eccard: Übers Gebirg Maria geht (ca. 1600) 

German composer Johannes Eccard lived from 1553 to 1611. He became a famous composer during the early days of Protestantism.

“Übers Gebirg Maria geht” translates into “Over the mountains Mary goes.”

This motet tells the story of how Mary, the mother of Jesus, traveled over mountains to find her cousin Elizabeth, whom she wanted to tell about her divinely ordained pregnancy.

The motet is written for five vocal parts (first soprano, second soprano, alto, tenor, and bass).

Franz Schubert: Der Alpenjäger (1817)   

The word “Der Alpenjäger” means “The Alpine Hunter” in English.

In this song, Schubert sets a poem by his dear friend Johann Mayrhofer describing the hunter’s hike.

He climbs up into the mist on steep paths, thinking of his beloved, who is still at home. When he mounts the summit, the beams of sunlight remind him of her.

Hector Berlioz: Harold en Italie, Movement 1 “Harold aux montagnes” (1834)  

Harold en Italie is an unusual piece. In many ways, it resembles a symphony, but with a twist: there’s a very prominent solo viola part.

Said viola represents the piece’s protagonist, whose name is Harold.

Titles of the work’s four movements suggest a story starring Harold:

1. Harold in the mountains
2. March of the pilgrims
3. Serenade of an Abruzzo mountaineer
4. Orgy of bandits

The mysterious opening movement opens in a melancholy fashion, but soon Harold’s genial good nature is revealed as the music shifts from a soulful adagio to a bouncy, lively allegro.

Franz Liszt: Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne (1848)   

“Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne” translates into “What one hears on the mountain.” It’s based on a famous Victor Hugo poem from 1831.

This piece is not quite an overture and not quite a symphony (although it is sometimes referred to as the Bergsymphonie, or Mountain Symphony). It’s probably most accurate to call it a symphonic tone poem.

Liszt himself described the story behind the work:

The poet hears two voices; one immense, splendid, and full of order, raising to the Lord its joyous hymn of praise – the other hollow, full of pain, swollen by weeping, blasphemies, and curses. One spoke of nature, the other of humanity! Both voices struggle near to each other, cross over, and melt into one another, till finally they die away in a state of holiness.

Modest Mussorgsky: Night on Bald Mountain (1867)   

Like Liszt, composer Modest Mussorgsky also jumped on the tone poem bandwagon in the mid-nineteenth century.

He originally meant to write an opera that included scenes from a witches’ Sabbath set on the Lysa Hora, also known as Bald Mountain, outside of Kyiv.

Lysa Hora (Bald Mountain), Kyiv © travels.in.ua

Mussorgsky described the scene in his head:

The witches used to gather on this mountain, … gossip, play tricks and await their chief—Satan. On his arrival, they, i.e. the witches, formed a circle round the throne on which he sat, in the form of a kid, and sang his praise. When Satan was worked up into a sufficient passion by the witches’ praises, he gave the command for the sabbath, in which he chose for himself the witches who caught his fancy.

The project went through a variety of guises until it became the classic that we associate today with Halloween and Disney’s Fantasia.

Edvard Grieg: In the Hall of the Mountain King from Peer Gynt Suite No. 1 (1875 ) 

In 1867, famous Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen wrote a play called Peer Gynt. It wasn’t staged until 1875.

At that first staging, fellow Norwegian Edvard Grieg provided music to go alongside it.

In the Hall of the Mountain King, the protagonist Peer Gynt enters into a dream where he is brought into the headquarters of the troll king.

The description sets the scene: “There is a great crowd of troll courtiers, gnomes and goblins. Dovregubben sits on his throne, with crown and sceptre, surrounded by his children and relatives. Peer Gynt stands before him. There is a tremendous uproar in the hall.”

Grieg intended this excerpt to be satirical: “For The Hall of the Mountain King, I have written something that so reeks of cowpats, ultra-Norwegianism, and ‘to-thyself-be-enough-ness’ that I cannot bear to hear it, though I hope that the irony will make itself felt.”

Joachim Raff: Symphony No. 7, “In the Alps” (1875)   

German-Swiss composer Joachim Raff was a prominent composer in Germany during the Romantic Era.

His music is rarely heard today, but it’s still worth listening to, given that he was an important colleague of many composers we know today, like Brahms and Bruckner.

Raff enjoyed attaching descriptive subtitles to his symphonies. His seventh portrays the grandeur of the Alps.

Alps from Garmisch

Raff had a friend and colleague named Hans von Bülow, who had a student named Richard Strauss. Turns out, Strauss also wrote a massive orchestral work inspired by the Alps. Many listeners have pointed out the similarities between these two works. A generation separates the two pieces, and it’s fascinating to hear what elements the works share – and what they don’t!

Vincent d’Indy: Symphony on French Mountain Air (1886)   

French composer Vincent d’Indy wrote his Symphony on French Mountain Air in 1886. It’s unique for a symphony in that it contains an important piano part, creating an unusual aural texture.

D’Indy heard the work’s main theme as a folk song while in the mountains of southern France. He then adapted it for orchestra and piano, expanding on it.

Charles Ives: From the Steeples and the Mountains (1901-02)   

American composer Charles Ives became famous for his artistic independence and iconoclasm. He was a successful insurance salesman, writing music on the side, and could afford to follow the beat of his own drum, so to speak.

Supposedly, when he was a child, he was taking a hike and heard four different churches’ bells ringing at the same time, all sounding different notes. The experience made a big impression.

Something like that effect is replicated here, with its orchestration for four sets of bells and brass.

He wrote on the score, “From the Steeples—the Bells—then the Rocks on the Mountains begin to shout!”

Arnold Bax: A Mountain Mood (1915)   

In 1914, 31-year-old married father Arnold Bax fell in love with a lovely, charming, jaw-droppingly talented piano student named Harriet Cohen, who turned nineteen in December. As you can imagine, their relationship faced its share of difficulties.

Bax nicknamed her Tania, because they and all of their friends gave each other nicknames inspired by trendy Russian ballet.

Their desperate romance continued on and off for nearly forty years. He wrote A Mountain Mood for her and dedicated it to “Tania who plays it perfectly.”

Richard Strauss: An Alpine Symphony (1915)   

The scale of Strauss’s Alpine Symphony is staggering. It calls for 125 musicians, lasts nearly an hour, and charts eleven hours in a mountain climber’s day.

Over the course of this day, Strauss portrays all kinds of mountaintop scenes: sunrise, the ascent, a waterfall, a pasture, an overgrown wrong path, a glacier, mists, a massive thunderstorm and tempest, and finally, a descent.

Strauss loved the mountains so much that he built a villa in the Alps, and that passion for them shows through in this piece.

Pavel Haas: String Quartet No. 2 “From the Monkey Mountains” (1925)   

Czech composer Pavel Haas was born in 1899. He studied with influential composer Leoš Janáček in the early 1920s.

He had a relatively small output, and, due to his perfectionistic nature, refused to give all of his works opus numbers. “From the Monkey Mountains”, however, was among the lucky ones and was bestowed with the number opus 7.

In it, Haas combines Janáček’s sometimes jagged compositional language with elements of jazz.

If you’re surprised by how good this quartet is and wondering why you’ve never heard of its composer before, it’s because Pavel Haas was killed by the Nazis in Auschwitz. Read more from “5 Composers Who Died in the Holocaust Who You Need to Know”.

Ralph Vaughan Williams: The Lake in the Mountains (1947)   

In 1941, actors Leslie Howard and Laurence Olivier appeared in a British wartime propaganda film called 49th Parallel. The movie follows a crew of German U-boat operators who escape to Canada and meet a variety of fates.

Its soundtrack was written by Ralph Vaughan Williams, and the music from that soundtrack is the quiet piano piece The Lake in the Mountains.

Alan Hovhaness: Symphony No. 2, “Mysterious Mountain” (1955)   

In 1955 Armenian-American composer Alan Hovhaness was commissioned to write an orchestral work by Leopold Stokowski and the Houston Symphony, with the premiere appearing on television on NBC. Eventually, it was bestowed the title “Symphony No. 2.”

Interestingly, Hovhannes ended up not being a very big fan of the work. He later said:

I remember hearing celestial ballet in my head as I lay down to rest from writing the work. Later, I transcribed what I heard in my sleep. After I wrote it, then heard it again in my sleep, certain versions were wrong. So I corrected it. Now I cannot bear to hear it […] it’s just certain parts move me. I go out of the hall whenever the piece is performed.

Jennifer Higdon: Cold Mountain (2015)   

In 1997, author Charles Frazier wrote a novel called Cold Mountain. It tells the story of a soldier in the Confederate Army who deserts during the American Civil War, and his journey to North Carolina to return to his beloved…and the tragic fallout that follows him.

The novel was turned into an Oscar-winning film in 2003.

Cold Mountain movie poster

In 2015, composer Jennifer Higdon wrote an opera based on the book. Higdon was a fitting choice, as she’d spent years in Tennessee as a child. She even helped the librettist “southernize” the libretto, so it would be more faithful to speech patterns found in the Appalachian mountains.

Conclusion

Mountains have not only shaped humans’ physical landscapes. They’ve also clearly shaped cultural and musical landscapes, too.

We hope you’ve enjoyed these fifteen pieces of classical music about mountains! Let us know which one is your favourite.

Max Steiner, the Movie Composer Injected With Amphetamines

By Emily E. Hogstad

  

Max Steiner, hailed as the “father of film music,” is one of the most influential composers in the history of Hollywood.

Over the course of a career that spanned half a century, Steiner crafted some of the most iconic scores in cinematic history.

Steiner was no stranger to the world of classical music. In fact, he took massive inspiration from Richard Wagner, his tutor Gustav Mahler, and even his godfather, Richard Strauss.

Today, we’re looking at the life of Max Steiner and his impact on the world of cinema…including the taxing work assignment with a deadline so tight, it required twenty-hour workdays and amphetamines to meet.

Max Steiner

Max Steiner’s Family Background

Max Steiner was born on 10 May 1888 in Vienna.

His family’s roots in Viennese arts and culture ran deep. He was named after his grandfather Maximilian Steiner, the theater director who popularised Viennese operetta and convinced Johann Strauss II to write for the genre.

Later, Maximilian’s son Gábor followed in his father’s footsteps and became an impresario himself.

Gábor’s wife Marie was also a music-lover and was a dancer early in her career, before giving birth to her only child, Max.

Max’s godfather was none other than composer Richard Strauss!

A Musically Precocious Childhood

Max’s voracious love of music was obvious from an early age. By the age of six, he was taking multiple music lessons a week.

He also started improvising on the piano, and with his father’s encouragement, writing the improvisations down.

At twelve, again with the support of his father, he conducted a performance of composer Gustave Kerker’s operetta The Belle of New York.

Max Steiner’s Musical Education

In 1904, he began attending the Imperial Academy of Music. While there, he was tutored by Gustav Mahler.

He breezed through four years of curriculum in one, studying composition, harmony, counterpoint, and a veritable orchestra’s worth of instruments.

Around this time, he also composed his first operetta, The Beautiful Greek Girl. No doubt to his disappointment, his father passed on staging it, claiming it wasn’t up to his standards.

Max rebelled by offering Greek Girl to another impresario. To his satisfaction, it was a success, running for a year.

Max Steiner’s London Career

The success of The Beautiful Greek Girl led to a number of conducting opportunities abroad.

A British production invited him to conduct The Merry Widow, an operetta by his father’s former colleague Franz Lehár.

Steiner moved to London and stayed there for eight years, conducting The Merry Widow and other operettas.

Escape to New York

Max Steiner

However, the onset of World War I brought his career to a screeching halt. Britain declared war on Austria in August 1914. Steiner was twenty-six years old.

Because of his nationality, he was interned in Britain as an enemy alien. He was only released because of his friendship with the Duke of Westminster.

Despite that friendship, he was ultimately ejected from Britain and his scores compounded, ending up in New York City with just $32 to his name.

A Broadway Career, and a Start in Film

Steiner soon found work on Broadway, orchestrating, arranging, and conducting. He conducted works by George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Victor Herbert, and others.

He began watching the development of the nascent movie industry with great interest, speaking to studio founders and directors about the potential of music to accompany silent films.

In 1927, he orchestrated and conducted a Broadway musical by composer Harry Tierney. When Tierney was hired by RKO Pictures, he urged the studio to hire Steiner, too.

At the time, the potential of movie music was yet to be fully understood. It was thought by studio heads that soundtracks should come from a library of cheap pre-recorded tracks, as opposed to being written for specific films (an idea that Steiner would push back hard against). Steiner was hired as the head of the music department at RKO, but only on a month-to-month contract.

He scored Dixiana, the Western Cimarron, and Symphony of Six Million. Symphony of Six Million, with its extensive score, was a landmark in cinema history, and it helped to convince film executives of the impact that a soundtrack could have on a movie. 

Max Steiner’s Hollywood Career

King Kong

Throughout the 1930s, Steiner was on the front lines of establishing the language of movie music, influenced by figures like Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss.

He scored King Kong in 1933, finishing the iconic score in a jaw-dropping two weeks. It has often been called the most influential soundtrack of all time, demonstrating for executives, producers, and audiences once and for all what exactly a custom-written score could do for a movie.

Steiner relied on the Wagnerian idea of leitmotif, i.e., playing specific themes during the appearance of specific characters or ideas.

King Kong (1933) – Beauty Killed the Beast Scene  

He also composed for and conducted many of the Astaire/Rogers musicals.

In 1937, Steiner was hired by Warner Bros, where he continued his extremely productive output.

Scoring Gone With the Wind

Gone With the Wind

In 1939, Steiner was hired by Selznick International Pictures to score Gone With the Wind.

He composed the score to the nearly four-hour film in three months. At the same time, in the year 1939, he composed the score for twelve other films.

Producer David O. Selznick had concerns that Steiner wouldn’t be able to finish in time, so he hired Franz Waxman to write a backup score.

However, it wasn’t needed. Steiner ended up delivering by working twenty-hour days, aided by prescribed injected amphetamines. He also had the assistance of four orchestrators.

Today, it’s widely regarded as one of the greatest film scores of all time. 

Max Steiner’s Academy Awards

Gone With the Wind didn’t win an Academy Award for best score (it lost out to The Wizard of Oz), but over the course of his career, Steiner would win multiple Oscars.

In 1936, he won for his score to the thriller The Informer. In 1943, he won another for the drama Now, Voyager, and yet another in 1945 for the wartime drama Since You Went Away.

Other classics that he scored during this time include Casablanca, The Big Sleep, Mildred Pierce, and others.  

Max Steiner’s Late Career

During the 1950s, changing tastes in movie music meant that Steiner’s lush, operatic style began to fall out of fashion.

He had one last major triumph with the theme for A Summer Place in 1959, which spent nine weeks at number one in 1960. It beat out Ray Charles, Ella Fitzgerald, Elvis Presley, and Frank Sinatra at the Grammys for Record of the Year.   

Sadly, his health and vision began deteriorating later in life. He died of congestive heart failure in 1971 at the age of 83.

Max Steiner’s Innovations   

Steiner was one of the first composers to employ a measuring machine to guarantee exact timings in a score. Before him, most composers just used a stopwatch, but Steiner felt it was important to sync his score with the film more closely than a watch’s second hand would allow.

He was also among the first to embrace click tracks. A click track consists of a series of holes punched into soundtrack film, creating a metronomic effect. Headphones can then be used and instruments played along to an exact tempo.

Throughout his career, he was on the cutting edge of developing ideas and principles about what scenes should and shouldn’t have music in them, as well as how loud music should be relative to dialogue.

He was also fascinated by the power of diegetic music (i.e., music that is played within the scene, that the characters also hear). Think of the famous renditions of “La Marseillaise” or “As Time Goes By” in Casablanca.   

Max Steiner’s Modern Influence

Max Steiner conducting the score of King Kong

Steiner’s influence continues even today.

John Williams has cited him (as well as Steiner’s compatriot Erich Wolfgang Korngold) as a major influence, as has James Newton Howard, who scored the 2005 remake of King Kong.

He also pushed for film composers to earn residuals, helping to create an expectation that composers would be fairly compensated for their work.

It’s clear that for as long as movies exist, Max Steiner’s influence will continue to be felt.

10 Pieces of Classical Music About Childhood

by Emily E. Hogstad  

Classical music sometimes has a reputation of being solely for elderly people. If that’s true (spoiler alert: it’s not), it’s certainly strange how many pieces of classical music are about childhood and youth.

Today we’re looking at classical music inspired by childhood.

© soundgirls.org

Robert Schumann: Kinderszenen (1838) 

Robert Schumann’s Kinderszenen (“Songs from Childhood”) is a set of thirteen pieces for solo piano about childhood.

Robert was twenty-eight at the time he wrote these pieces, and he was dating the nineteen-year-old piano superstar Clara Wieck.

For a variety of reasons, Clara had always been mature for her age, and at one point she observed that Robert was “like a child.” Robert, amused, decided to embrace his childlike nature, took her idea, and ran with it.

The pieces in this collection include Blind Man’s Buff, Knight of the Hobbyhorse, and, most famously, Dreaming (better-known by its German title, Träumerei). 

Teresa Carreño: Mi Teresita (ca 1885) 

Teresa Carreño was one of the most famous women composers of her generation, and Mi Teresita (“My Little Teresa”) is one of her most famous works.

It’s a waltz that was written for her third child, Teresita, who had been born in 1882. (As a bit of trivia, Carreño had six children in all: one by French violinist Émile Sauret, three by Italian baritone Giovanni Tagliapietra, and two more by German pianist Eugen d’Albert.)

Teresita would become a concert pianist like her mother.

Amy Beach: Children’s Carnival (1894) 

In 1894, twenty-seven-year-old American composer Amy Beach wrote six charming piano pieces for young players. She called the works Children’s Carnival.

The Carnival portrayed different stock characters often found in commedia dell’arte or pantomime, such as the meddling merchant Pantalon, the street-smart and gossipy maid Columbina, and her nimble, quick-thinking love interest, Harlequin.

Beach portrays each character with sweet and satisfying innocence.

Claude Debussy: Children’s Corner (1906-08) 

In January 1905, Claude Debussy’s married mistress Emma Bardac became pregnant. That spring, both Debussy and Bardac divorced from their respective spouses.

In October 1905, their little daughter Claude-Emma, whom they nicknamed Chouchou, was born. Debussy found Chouchou to be delightful beyond words.

Debussy with his daughter Chou-Chou

To celebrate his love for her, he wrote a six-movement suite of piano pieces called Children’s Corner. The work’s translated dedication reads, “To my dear little Chouchou, with tender apologies from her father for what follows.”

Children’s Corner portrays various scenes from childhood, including a serenade for a doll, a lullaby for an elephant, and a portrait of dancing snow.

John Alden Carpenter: Adventures in a Perambulator (1914)  

John Alden Carpenter was a composer born in Illinois in 1876. He studied music as a young man but chose not to make his living in music, instead joining the family shipping business as vice-president.

In 1914, he composed an orchestral portrait of his baby daughter Ginny’s day, perhaps taking inspiration from Richard Strauss, who, in 1903, had immortalized his own wife and baby in a tone poem called Symphonia Domestica.

Baby in Perambulator

Carpenter provided an incredibly detailed description of Ginny’s day from her perspective:

Every morning – after my second breakfast – if the wind and the sun are favorable, I go out. I should like to go alone, but my will is overborne…

Almost satiated with adventure, my Nurse firmly pushes me on, and almost before I recover my balance I am face to face with new sensation. The land comes to an end, and there at my feet is The Lake…

We pass on. Probably there is nothing more in the World. If there is, it is superfluous. There IS. It is Dogs!

Read more about Adventures in a Perambulator.

Florence Price: “To My Little Son” (ca 1915) 

Sometime around 1915, composer Florence Price set a melancholy poem by Julia Johnson Davis to music.

In your face I sometimes see
shadowings of the man to be
And eager dream of what my son shall be
in twenty years and one…

This was an especially poignant song for Price to set, as she lost a baby boy in infancy.

Edward Elgar: Nursery Suite (1931) 

Nursery Suite is one of the last pieces of music that Elgar ever wrote. In 1930, a 73-year-old Elgar told a friend that he’d recently found a box of music in manuscript dating from his youth.

His friend suggested that he work them up into something to celebrate the recent birth of Princess Margaret. He agreed, and by the following year he produced a sweet little orchestral suite with movement titles like “The Sad Doll” and “The Merry Doll.”

Elgar expanded the dedication: the final work was dedicated to Princess Margaret, Princess Elizabeth (the future Elizabeth II), and their mother, the Duchess of York.

Sergei Prokofiev: Peter and the Wolf (1936) 

Peter and the Wolf was commissioned by the director of the Central Children’s Theatre in Moscow. She wanted Prokofiev to write a special symphony for children.

Peter, the work’s protagonist, plays in a meadow, listening to a whole menagerie of animals symbolised by various instruments.

Peter’s grandfather warns him of a gray wolf who might come to attack him. On cue, the wolf makes an appearance. Luckily, with the help of his animal friends, Peter is able to catch it.

Hunters come out of the forest, ready to kill the wolf, but Peter convinces them to put the wolf in a cage and bring it to a zoo instead. They do so in triumphant formation. At the last minute, a quacking comes from the wolf’s stomach: he has eaten the duck whole!

The work has proven to be incredibly popular and enduring, and it is often used even today as an introduction to the orchestra and orchestral instruments.

Benjamin Britten: The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra (1945) 

In the mid-1940s, composer Benjamin Britten was commissioned to score an educational documentary called Instruments of the Orchestra.

The main theme comes from another famous British composer: Henry Purcell‘s incidental music to Aphra Behn’s Abdelazer.

Each section shows off a different part of the orchestra, helping young listeners (of all ages!) to appreciate the uniqueness of each one.

Interestingly, there is a version with narration and another one without.

Samuel Barber: Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (1947) 

Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 is for orchestra and soprano soloist. It is a nostalgic portrait of the narrator’s childhood.

The lyrics are from a 1938 prose poem by James Agee, describing the summer before his father died in a car accident:

On the rough, wet grass of the back yard, my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there….They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all. The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near…

Barber’s music beautifully captures the uneasy poignancy of Agee’s words.

Conclusion

So there you have it: ten pieces of classical music about childhood and youth.

Did you have a favorite piece of classical music as a child? Is it still a favorite now? Let us know!

Thus Spoke Friedrich Nietzsche: Piano Music

by Georg Predota, Interlude

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) is primarily known as a philosopher who published some groundbreaking books. “Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None,” was published in four volumes between 1883 and 1885, and it spawned a number of philosophical and theological contemplations. Not to mention a gigantic tone poem by Richard Strauss!

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche at 21

Essentially, Nietzsche questioned the value and objectivity of truth, looking at God as a historical process and construct. Nietzsche wrote numerous texts on morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science. Interestingly, he never really trusted the written word. He wrote, “all communication through words is shameless. The word diminishes and makes stupid; the word depersonalises, the word makes what is uncommon common.”

It might come as a surprise, but music was actually Nietzsche’s true love. Descended from a family of pastors where music and theology went hand in hand, young Friedrich was an accomplished pianist and organist by the time he reached the age of seven. At that age, he already played several Beethoven sonatas, transcriptions of Haydn Symphonies, and he was skilled in the way of improvisation. A couple of recent recordings have engaged with Nietzsche’s piano compositions, so we decided to take a closer look.

Reminiscences on my Life

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Young Nietzsche initially improvised his own melodies, yet he soon moved on to sketch motets, symphonies, masses and oratorios, most of them unfinished. As he grew up, Nietzsche switched to smaller forms, particularly Lieder and piano pieces. As pianist Jeroen van Veen writes, “these pieces reflect the philosopher as a human being, vulnerable and desirous, but above all melancholic.”

At the age of 14, Nietzsche wrote his “Reminiscences on my Life.” He explained, “All qualities are united in music: it can lift us up, it can be capricious, it can cheer us up and delight us, nay, with its soft, melancholy tunes, it can even break the resistance of the toughest character.”

“Its main purpose, however, is to lead our thoughts upward so that it elevates us and even deeply moves us. All humans who despise it should be considered mindless, animal-like creatures. Let music, this most marvellous gift from God, remain forever my companion on the pathways of life.” 

Barbarous Frenzy

In his “Reminiscences on my Life,” Nietzsche carefully listed his writings and his compositions, and at age fourteen, he had 46 compositions to his name. The earliest Lieder settings of Klaus Groth, the Hungarian poet Sándor Petöfi, Pushkin and Hoffmann von Fallersleben, were all composed “in a kind of barbarous frenzy, as the demon of music took hold of me.”

Nietzsche never took composition lessons, as he was essentially self-taught. He described himself as “a wretched youth who tortured his piano to the point of drawing from it cries of despairs, who with his own hands heave up in front of himself the mire of the most dismal greyish-brown harmonies.” 

The Germania

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

At the age of 16, Nietzsche started on a Christmas oratorio that was never finished. However, he would develop several themes for later use in subsequent compositions. “I look for words for a melody that I have and for a melody for words that I have, and these two things I have don’t go together, even though they come from the same soul. But such is my fate.”

Nietzsche’s early piano music is frequently dedicated to family and friends. Together with two young friends, he founded a small society called “The Germania,” which was dedicated to the “development of the spirit.” They would send each other compositions and poems, lectures and articles. And Nietzsche loved to improvise. A fellow student listened to these improvisations and wrote, “I should have no difficulty in believing that even Beethoven did not play extempore in a more moving manner.” 

Assessment

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche’s Hungarian March

However, assessment from professional sources was less encouraging. Nietzsche sent Hans von Bülow, son-in-law of Richard Wagner, his “Manfred Meditation” for evaluation. Bülow was not impressed and wrote, “this music is the most extreme in fantastic extravagance and the most unsatisfying and most anti-musical composition I have seen in a long time. Is this a joke that deliberately mocks all rules of tonal harmony, of the higher syntax as well as of ordinary orthography?”

“In musical terms, this piece is the equivalent to a crime in the moral world, with which the musical muse, Euterpe, was raped. If you would allow me to give you some good advice, just in case you are actually serious with your aberration into the area of composition, stick with composing vocal music, since the word can lead the way on the wild sea of tones. I apologize, esteemed Herr Professor, of having thrown such an enlightened mind as yours, into such regrettable piano cramps.” 

Lou Salomé

Lou Salomé

Nietzsche’s “Hymn to Life” is based on a text by Lou Salomé, a Russian-born psychoanalyst, well-travelled author, narrator, and essayist. At a literary salon in the city, Salomé met the author Paul Rée, who instantly proposed to her. Salomé declined and suggested setting up an academic commune, which was joined by Nietzsche in April 1882. He instantly fell in love with her as well, but she rejected him twice. Instead, Salomé, Rée, and Nietzsche travelled in search of setting up their commune in an abandoned monastery, but as no suitable location was found, the plan came to naught.

We do find an interesting assessment of Nietzsche by Salomé, which reads, “The higher he rose as a philosopher in his exaltation of life, the more deeply he suffered, as a human being, from his own teachings about life. This battle within his soul, the true source of the philosophy of his last years, is only imperfectly represented in his words and books, but it sounds perhaps most profoundly through his music to my poem Hymn to Life.” 

Sabbatical

After completing the “Hymn of Life” and receiving Bülow’s devastating letter, Nietzsche wrote, “As for my music, I only know that it allows me to master a mood that unsatisfied, would perhaps produce even more damage. If music serves only as a diversion or a kind of vain ostentation, it is sinful and harmful. Yet this fault is very frequent; all of modern music is filled with it.”

After receiving this letter, Nietzsche did not touch his piano for a while, but in the end, “his awareness of being an amateur was overshadowed by his urge to become a better person, through music,” writes Vrouwkje Tuinman. As Nietzsche frequently proclaimed, “Emotions, morals, the world: the only way to (maybe) grasp the essence of being is surrendering to the highest of art forms,” he writes again and again. “Without music, life would be a mistake.” 

The Affair Wagner

Richard Wagner

During his time as Professor of Philosophy at Basel University, Nietzsche became a close personal friend of Cosima and Richard Wagner, then living in Swiss exile. He was a regular house guest and even had his own room at Tribschen. We know that Nietzsche fell in love with Cosima Wagner, and he certainly composed some music for her.

Nietzsche dedicated his first book, “The Birth of Tragedy” to Wagner, proclaiming Wagner’s music the modern rebirth. The first part of the book was developed from long conversations between Cosima, Wagner and Nietzsche, roughly around the same time that Wagner began to develop the story of what eventually would become the “Ring Cycle.” 

Postlude

Cosima Wagner

Nietzsche offered Richard and Cosima his “Reminiscence of a New Year’s Eve,” but they basically ignored it. In turn, Nietzsche started to object to Wagner’s “endless melody,” suggesting that listening to Wagner’s music made his whole body feel discomfort. He called it “a music without a future,” and that the effects of Wagner’s music are “for idiots and the masses.”

Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown at the age of 44, from which he never recovered. For the last eleven years of his life, he was no longer able to speak or write, but he continued to play the piano. Listening, performing and composing music became an unconscious philosophical activity for Nietzsche, who had suggested earlier that “sound allowed me to say certain things that words were incapable of expressing.”

Editors of Nietzsche considered his compositions “amateurish and lacking in originality.” However, composing for Nietzsche meant experimentation and therapy, as he famously wrote, “we have art so not to die from the truth.” His piano music continues to be explored, and scholars write that “these piano miniatures present a fascinating window into the creative mind of a still-lofty figure in Western thought.” To me, his piano music, an elaboration of the conflicted world of Schumann, sounds hesitant and even unguarded, and the occasional ray of optimism is quickly cast aside by all-pervasive melancholy.