Till Eulenspiegel einmal anders

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

Till Eulenspiegel einmal anders!

(Till Eulenspiegel different for once)

arranged for five instruments by Franz Hasenöhrl (1954)

Franz Hasenöhrl might look like a pseudonym - Hasenöhrl means something like “little hare’s ears” - and it wouldn’t be at all suprising if the composer of this drastic reduction of Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel had wanted to conceal his identity. But Hasenörhl is a fairly common name in Germany and Austria and, indeed, a Franz Hasenöhrl was professor of music at Vienna University in 1954 when the arrangement was published and first performed by member of the Vienna Philharmonic. So he could be our man.

Completed in 1895, Strauss’s tone poem is based on the exploits of the legendary Till Eulenspiegel, man of the people and reckless enemy of authority. This bizarre chamber version not only reduces a full-scale late-romantic orchestra to five instruments - violin, clarinet, horn, bassoon and double bass - but also cuts the work down to about half its original length. While inevitably distorting Strauss’s rondo structure, the Hasenörhl arrangement does, of course, retain the two main themes identified with Till himself - a heroic if rhythically devious horn call and a cheeky clarinet motif - and the more picturesque of the situations he gets involved in. He is at his most wicked in his parodistic disguise as a priest (on sanctimonious horn and clarinet), at his most sympathetic as a lover (in a sentimental but frustrated episode following the central violin cadenza), and at his most pathetic when dramatically condemned to death by hanging. A brief epilogue revives him, at least in spirit.