This master’s thesis examines the representation of nature in instrumental music. The theoretical section addresses questions of musical meaning, musical semantics, and the aesthetics of nature, and explores the ways in which music establishes connections with extramusical content. Through a historical survey of the development of musical representations of nature from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century, the thesis presents various approaches composers used to depict natural phenomena and landscapes in instrumental music.
The central part of the thesis is an analysis of Richard Strauss’s An Alpine Symphony, focusing on the work’s programmatic design, motivic development, and methods of musical representation of nature. The analysis demonstrates that Strauss constructs a coherent system of leitmotifs that connects individual programmatic sections into a unified musical whole. Nature is represented both through tone painting and through the use of harmony, orchestration, and motivic transformations. The work thus emerges as one of the most distinctive examples of programmatic representations of nature in late-Romantic orchestral music.
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