Richard Strauss came from an extremely conservative family. His father, Franz Joseph, the principal horn player in the Munich Court Orchestra, considered Brahms a radical and Wagner’s music beyond the pale, forbidding his son to listen to it. Richard assimilated the music of the early and middle nineteenth century in his early works, composing as a committed classicist. But he soon discovered that the musical language taught by his father was too confining for his own fertile mind. 

Strauss quickly found his voice through his own unique development of the tone poem, or symphonic poem, a purely instrumental rendition of a text, usually poetic or narrative in nature. The term “symphonic poem” had been coined by Liszt in 1854 for compositions accompanied by a program that the audience was supposed to read before listening to the music. 

Strauss’s musical rendering of specific texts is far more detailed than Liszt’s, although it is often difficult to follow without a “road map.” In the decade between 1888 and 1898, he produced a string of tone poems, beginning with Aus Italien and Macbeth. Don Juan, completed in 1889, was the first to be publicly performed, and catapulted him to international recognition. He expressed his youthful exuberance, using three extracts from Don Juan, an incomplete verse play by Nikolaus Lenau (1802-1850), which he copied as a preface in the score. 

In Lenau’s play, Don Juan’s paramour/ victims are: Maria, who follows him to escape from a forced marriage and is abandoned; Clara, who actually rejects him before he can reject her; Isabella, whom Don Juan seduces, disguised as her fiancé; Anna, who never actually appears but whom Don Juan apostrophizes from afar; and finally, an unnamed woman who dies of a broken heart. Don Juan receives the news of her death at a masked ball. Unlike Tirso’s Don Juan and Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Lenau’s hero is not felled by a stone dinner guest meting out divine retribution. Rather, he intentionally lowers his guard during a duel with the son of one of his victims.

In the tone poem Strauss does not follow the specific details of Lenau’s play. Instead he develops an opening theme expressing the wild sexual striving of his hero, followed by subsidiary themes representing the Don’s various conquests. Although it is difficult to identify any of the specific paramours of the source play, Strauss creates a different musical character for each of the secondary themes that reflect their diverse personalities and qualities of love. One theme is introduced by a soaring solo violin melody; a second accompanied by a gasping flute motive and the third a Spanish oboe melody. Strauss develops them all alongside the restless motives of the Don. 

The second half of the tone poem – the development section of the sonata structure – begins with the so-called the “Carnival Scene,” which corresponds to Lenau’s masked ball. It marks the beginning of the Don’s decline, including pricks of conscience as his former lovers haunt his thoughts. Their themes are intertwined with his new heroic theme and ultimately undermine his personality. He wanders despondently through a churchyard where he comes upon the statue of a nobleman whom he has killed, and in a final act of bravado invites him to supper. But it is the nobleman’s son, Pedro, who arrives, seeking revenge. Observed by the ghosts of all his lovers and illegitimate children, Don Juan begins by putting up a valiant fight, during which all the themes reappear and the music becomes increasingly frantic. Suddenly the music halts and a minor chord precedes a trumpet call as Don Juan surrenders to his adversary and despair. In contrast to Don Giovanni’s fiery defiance, pianissimo timpani and pizzicato basses conclude the piece.