Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, Op. 28

Program notes

About the Work

Richard Strauss wrote Till Eulenspiegel in 1894 and 1895, in the wake of a failure. His first opera, Guntram, had met a lukewarm reception in Weimar and a disastrous one in Munich, his home city. His first idea for revenge was another opera, in which the medieval prankster Till Eulenspiegel would take on the narrow-minded burghers of Schilda, a thinly disguised Munich. He dropped the opera and poured the idea into an orchestral piece instead.

Till Eulenspiegel is an old figure of German folk tales, a peasant trickster who plays pranks on everyone from market traders to priests and professors. Strauss’s full title describes the piece as “Till Eulenspiegel’s merry pranks, after the old rogue’s tale, set in rondeau form for large orchestra”. The French spelling “rondeau” was itself something of a joke: the music is less a textbook rondo than a series of adventures held together by the return of Till’s themes. Strauss later wrote notes into a friend’s copy of the score that tell the story section by section.

The piece was dedicated to Strauss’s friend Arthur Seidl and first performed in Cologne in 1895 by the Gürzenich Orchestra under Franz Wüllner, with great success. It is Strauss’s most compact tone poem, at around fifteen minutes, and one of his most often played, even though it calls for a larger orchestra than any of his earlier ones, including a ratchet and a shrill clarinet in D.

What to Listen For

After a few gentle bars in the strings that suggest “once upon a time”, the horn plays Till’s first theme, a long, lilting phrase that rises, falls and ends with three emphatic notes. Soon the D clarinet answers with his second theme, a cheeky, wheedling figure that seems to laugh at its own joke. These two ideas return throughout the piece in endless disguises.

Then the adventures begin. Till rides his horse through the market, scattering the stalls (listen for the rattle of the ratchet). He disguises himself as a priest, and the music turns mock-solemn until his theme pokes through. He flirts with the girls, with a love theme in the first violins. He mocks a group of pompous scholars, their pedantic theme given to the bassoons.

The mood changes abruptly with a loud drum roll. Till is arrested and put on trial, and the heavy chords of the court alternate with his increasingly nervous attempts to joke his way out. The sentence is death. The D clarinet screams as he is hanged, and then the music falls silent. But Strauss adds an epilogue: the “once upon a time” music returns, and a final burst from the whole orchestra suggests that the spirit of a Till Eulenspiegel can never really be killed.