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Richard Strauss's Orchestral Music and the German Intellectual Tradition: The Philosophical Roots of Musical Modernism.

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Richard Strauss's Orchestral Music and the German Intellectual Tradition: The Philosophical Roots of Musical Modernism. By Charles Youmans. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. [x, 294 p. ISBN 0-253-34573-1. $39.95.] Music examples, index, bibliography.

This is the first book-length treatment of a central project in Strauss scholarship over the past decade or so: rescuing the composer from his outdated status as a "late romantic" and recasting him as an anti-romantic and early modernist. In this important book, Charles Youmans shores up this project and adds significant original contributions. Since the book assumes a thorough knowledge of Strauss's life, the orchestral works and their programs, and to a lesser extent German, most readers will need a supplementary "life and works" volume.

The book is divided into a prologue and two main parts: "The Private Intellectual Context of Strauss's Early Career"--with chapters on the composer's conversion to Wagnerism and appropriation of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Goethe, respectively--and "Orchestral Composition as Philosophical Critique" with chapters on the two cycles of tone poems and two later "symphonies." The book's title, however, does not represent its contents accurately; the discussion of Strauss's orchestral works occupies less than half the book, the "German intellectual tradition" includes only Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, and the context of "musical modernism" outside the confines of Strauss's orchestral works remains largely unaddressed. One suspects that the title might be "calculatedly overblown," to use Youmans's characterization of Strauss's Symphonia domestica and Eine Alpensinfonie (p. 214).

The premise of the book, as stated in the prologue (pp. 3-4), is that the hijacking of...

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