World Premiere: November 1, 1889
Last HSO performance: February 12, 2017
Instrumentation: 3 flutes with 3rd doubling piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp and strings
Duration: 17 minutes

It was in the 1630 drama El Burlador de Sevilla (“The Seducer of Seville”) by the Spanish playwright Tirso de Molina that the fantastic character of Don Juan first strutted upon the world’s stages. Tirso based his play on folk legends that were at least a century old in his day, and whose roots undoubtedly extend deeply into some Jungian archetype of masculine virility shared, from complementary viewpoints, by men and women alike. Don Juan found frequent literary representations thereafter, notably in works by Molière, Dumas, Byron, Espronceda, de Musset, Zorrilla and Shaw. A story of such intense passion was bound to inspire composers as well as men of letters, and Gluck, Delibes, Alfano, Dargomyzhsky and half a dozen others wrote pieces based on the character and his exploits. The most famous treatment of the tale is, of course, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and it was through that opera that Richard Strauss first became acquainted with the Spanish Lothario. In June 1885, Strauss attended a production of Paul Heyse’s play Don Juans Ende, and the drama and its subject, building on the influence of Mozart’s masterpiece, made a powerful impression on the young composer.

Strauss started sketching his own Don Juan late in 1887, soon after he had met Pauline de Ahna in August. Pauline, a singer of considerable talent, got on splendidly with Strauss, and they were soon in love and married. The impassioned love themes of Don Juan were written under the spell of that romance. (The couple remained apparently happily married for the rest of their lives, though Pauline was a renowned nag. Gustav and Alma Mahler would cross the street to avoid meeting her. In 1904, his torch still glowing, Richard wrote his Domestic Symphony — that grandiloquent ode to life among the pots and pans — as a tribute to his familial bliss with Pauline.) For the program of his tone poem, Strauss went not to da Ponte or the Spanish authors, but to the 19th-century Hungarian poet Nicolaus Lenau. Lenau, born in 1802, was possessed by a blazing romantic spirit fueled in part by a hopeless love for the wife of a friend. In a fit of idealism in 1832, he came to America and settled on a homestead in Ohio for a few months. Disappointed with the New World, he returned to Europe, where he produced an epic on the Faust legend in 1836, and then undertook a poetic drama based on Don Juan. Lenau left this latter work unfinished in 1844 when he lost his mind and was admitted to an asylum, where he died six years later. Lenau’s Don Juan was not a rakish extrovert but rather a vain, sensual idealist. In the author’s words, “My Don Juan is no hot-blooded man, eternally pursuing women. It is the longing in him to find a woman who is to him womanhood incarnate, and to enjoy in the one all the women on earth whom he cannot as individuals possess. Because he does not find her, although he reels from one to another, at last Disgust seizes hold of him, and this Disgust is the Devil that fetches him.” In Lenau’s version, Don Juan meets his death in a sword duel with the father of one of the women he has seduced. Disillusioned and empty, ready for death, he drops his guard and welcomes his fate.

Strauss’ tone poem captures the feverish emotion and charged sensuality of Lenau’s drama, but other than three abstruse excerpts from Lenau’s poem that appear in the score, the composer never gave a specific program for Don Juan. (He learned early that he could get far more publicity by letting critics and commentators contend over such details.) The body of the work comprises themes associated with the lover and his conquests. The vigorous opening strain and a stentorian melody majestically proclaimed by the horns near the mid-point of the work belong to Don Juan. The music depicting the women in his life is variously coquettish, passionate and ravishing. (Norman Del Mar, in his study of Strauss, called the beautiful oboe melody “one of the greatest lovesongs in all music”). In the closing pages, an enormous crescendo is suddenly broken off by a long silence. A quivering chill comes over the music. A dissonant note on the trumpets marks the fatal thrust. Quietly, without hope of redemption, the libertine dies.