Don Juan, Tone Poem, Op. 20

Program notes

About the Work

When Richard Strauss conducted the premiere of Don Juan in Weimar on 11 November 1889, he was twenty-five years old and almost unknown outside German conducting circles. The piece changed that overnight. Its torrential opening, a great upward sweep of the strings as if a curtain had been ripped away, announced a new voice in orchestral music, and within a few years Strauss was the most talked-about composer in Europe. The young man who wrote it was already an experienced practical musician: the son of the formidable Munich horn player Franz Strauss, he had grown up steeped in the Classical and early Romantic repertoire his conservative father loved, before falling under the spell of Wagner and Liszt and the idea of ‘programme music’: instrumental music that tells a story or paints a scene.

Don Juan is the work in which Strauss claimed that inheritance and made it his own. It is a tone poem, the genre Liszt had pioneered: a single continuous movement whose form is shaped by a poetic subject rather than by abstract Classical schemes. Strauss’s subject was not Mozart’s seducer dragged down to hell, nor quite Byron’s, but the Don Juan of a verse drama by the Austrian-Hungarian poet Nikolaus Lenau, left unfinished at the poet’s death. Lenau’s Don Juan is a Romantic idealist rather than a mere libertine, a man who pursues woman after woman in search of an unattainable ideal of perfect womanhood, and who, when the chase finally exhausts him, lets himself be killed in a duel out of sheer disenchantment. Strauss prefixed three excerpts from Lenau’s text to the score, and the music follows their emotional arc rather than any literal sequence of events.

The orchestral writing is famously demanding. The violins’ opening flourish and the high horn calls have terrified players and excited audiences for well over a century, and excerpts remain standard audition material precisely because they expose everything. Strauss would go on to write grander and longer tone poems (Death and Transfiguration the following year, then Till Eulenspiegel, Also sprach Zarathustra, and, on this same programme, Don Quixote), but Don Juan retains a special freshness: the sound of a brilliant young composer discovering exactly what a modern orchestra could do.

What to Listen For

Don Juan is short and headlong, but it falls into clearly felt sections. The opening is one of the great curtain-raisers in all music, a surging gesture that establishes the hero’s restless energy in a single breath. From it Strauss spins Don Juan’s principal theme, ardent and impatient.

Then come the loves. Listen for two great lyrical episodes where the music slows and softens: the first tender and questioning, the second, introduced by a long, rapturous solo oboe melody over hushed strings, the emotional heart of the piece: music of genuine yearning that hints Strauss’s Don Juan is searching for something more than conquest. Each time, the searching idealism gives way again to the driving main theme, and the chase resumes.

The turning point is unmistakable: a heroic new theme rings out on the four horns in unison, the very emblem of the cavalier at the height of his powers. But Strauss has prepared a devastating reversal. At the climax of the final duel, the whole orchestra suddenly stops; into the silence falls a single, ice-cold dissonant trumpet note: the sword-thrust. What follows is not a triumphant close but a slow ebbing into darkness, the hero’s fire dwindling to nothing. The ending is quiet, abrupt, and final.