Don Juan, tone poem, Op.20

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

Don Juan, tone poem, Op.20

One of the earliest of Strauss’s tone poems, Don Juan is also one of the best. Indeed, it is rare among works of its kind in being almost entirely comprehensible simply as music. Whether it is thought to be in sonata form, rondo form or sonata-rondo form - opinions differ, and it doesn’t really matter - nothing happens that needs explanation until the very end. Highly eccentric in symphonic terms, the closing bars present an inspired sound-image of the worst fate, short of death, that could befall a man like Don Juan.

It is true that many commentators have identified that eerie ending not with impotence but with death itself - including those who for no good reason associate episodes in the tone poem with characters in Mozart’s Don Giovanni and those who, with better reason, have scoured Nikolaus Lenau’s version of the legend for dramatic events that could correspond with the musical events. Lenau’s Don Juan, an unfinished verse play, does indeed have much to do with Strauss’s concept, as the composer acknowledged by prefacing his score with three extracts from the drama (which is much more relevant in this respect than the Ritter poem attached to Tod und Verklärung). Significantly, however, the first two Lenau extracts are not narrative but psychological commentary, on the insatiable urge of the serial seducer, and the third is concerned not with one of Juan’s adventures but with his ultimate misfortune: “Perhaps a bolt from the heavens, which I despised, fatally struck my potency,” he says, “and suddenly the world became barren for me, gloomy as the night.”

Whatever the precise meaning of the ending, it is a stark contrast to the irrepressible virility of the beginning of the work. How long Strauss had been planning Don Juan we do not know but, according to his own account, he “thought up the first themes in the cloisters of S. Antonio in Padua” on a trip to Italy in May 1888. It was an unlikely setting for such an intense and sustained priapic inspiration, including not only the vigorous introductory flourish but also the heroic main theme leaping ever higher up the violin range in E major. This surge of eager anticipation motivates the whole of the opening section until the brief but emphatic entry, fortissimo on the whole orchestra, of a new melody of great expressive potential. After some flirtatious preliminaries and some eloquent pleading on a solo violin, that melody becomes the ecstatically developed theme of the first love scene or, in rondo terms, the first episode.

In accordance with Lenau’s characterisation of Don Juan, however, the heroic main theme impatiently intervenes in anticipation of another adventure and another rondo episode. The second love scene begins, in fact, with a passionate serenade on violas and cellos, which is coyly answered at first by flute but which eventually moves the oboe to a poignant declaration of affection. Again, however, the fear of what Lenau calls “satiety and lust fatigue” moves Juan on. He is called away this time not by the heroic rondo theme but by a different idea, an urgently eloquent horn call for the whole section in unison. Not exactly a new theme, since it contains elements of earlier material, the horn call is now featured as prominently as the heroic main theme itself in an eventful development incorporating a scherzo section and, toward its end, distant and perhaps even distasteful memories of the love scenes.

The horn call is also represented at the climax of a closing section which, in an ordinary rondo, would be devoted to a final recall of the main theme in its original harmonies and a coda in the same key. The main theme is indeed recapitulated in E major but Strauss drives it relentlessly on beyond that point - not towards another triumph but to a sudden silence, a chilling intervention of wind chords with a dissonant trumpet, a kind of detumescence on tremolando violins, and an enfeebled ending in E minor.

Completed in the summer of 1888, not long after the revelation in the cloisters of S. Antonio in Padua, Don Juan was first performed, with the composer conducting, in Weimar in November 1889. An opera project on the same subject got no further than the two-act scenario drawn up by Strauss in 1892.