The Orchestration Analysis Of Richard Strauss’s "Heroic Career"

Richard Strauss is one of the major representative composers of the lateromanticism. His admirable artistic skills in the field of symphonic poem make himshine brightly on the stage of western music all the time, and all these stem from hisextraordinary "heroic dreams."The symphonic poem "Heroic Career"(Ein Heldenleben Op.40), created in1898, isa highly representative one in Richard Strauss’s seven symphonic poems. Both increative thoughts and skills of this work, it reflects the profound accomplishment andknowledge of him. This work can be said as the composer’s own autobiography.Strauss differs from Liszt in symphonic poem. He focused more on rendering thescene and describing the event, which makes audiences touch the composer’s souldeeply. As for the differences in detailed description and explanatory episodesbetween "Heroic Career" and his previous works, Strauss explained it in this way," itis enough to understand the poem is about a hero fights against the enemy, while thecontent description is not necessary." The first part of my paper is the introduction ofRichard Strauss’s life background, including the introduction of his major works andthe worship of Nietzsche’s philosophy, as well as the creation of symphonic poems.The second part is the musical ontology analysis of this poem, mainly on the deepstudy of band writing, that is to say the orchestration technology, along with thethemes and materials application and the background creating process. The last part isthe conclusion of the study of the work.Through the detailed quantitative analysis of the music, we come to theconclusion that the subject of this work is not in common, simplistic and dramaticorchestral writing in Romantic music, but the principle of symphonic thinking, whichis full of a large number of lines, that is, polyphony thinking. As he himself said,"only through the meaningful real polyphony, can the pinnacle of the sound miracle bereached."...