A celebration of personal strength:  intellectual, artistic, spiritual, that allowed Strauss to triumph where Mahler had been destroyed. Locus and character of this celebration is carefully laid out in Alpensinfonie, his own musical ‘Antichrist’ as well as an elegy for his friend Mahler.

This lies at the core of Strauss’ spirituality –  the beauty found on earth, the down to earthiness of an Alpine mountain, the summit of the attainable and the desirable.