I was looking for a book that took one of the tone poems by Strauss and gave a good musical analysis with historical background. I am a trained amateur musician and I have read several biographies on Strauss, so I thought reading this book would be no problem. Boy, was I wrong.
The book feels like a PhD thesis and is quite difficult to read. (I'm not sure if it is a thesis or not.) Actually, it feels more like a parody of a PhD thesis. 90 percent of the book seems completely irrelevant to understanding the piece. The author spends a lot of time on 19th century discussions of program music vs. pure music, and a lot of time on how the music relates to the Nietzsche's work. At times I was totally lost in the abstruse philosophical discussions. There is no comprehensive explanation of how the piece is put together, but rather many separate discussions of different parts of the piece. There are many references to bar numbers, so unless you have the score in front of you, these are useless. There is also some of musical analysis, but with relatively few musical illustrations, most of this is just not understandable.
The only good thing about this book is that (including footnotes at the end of the book and the index) it's only 126 pages.
