“Never look encouragingly at the brass, except with a short glance to give an important cue.” — Richard Strauss

TONE POEM: A piece of orchestral music, typically one movement, based on an idea or story.

FURTHER LISTENING:

Strauss: Don Quixote
Salome
Till Eulenspiegel
Death and Transfiguration

To put it delicately, the German composer Richard Strauss didn’t shy away from composing music for racy scenarios. There's the sultry, slinking “Dance of the Seven Veils” from his biblical opera Salome, where Salome dances to tempt King Herrod. There’s the in-medias res opening of the opera Der Rosenkavalier, with its gasping, whooping cries in the brass. And then there’s Don Juan, his first famous tone poem based on the tale of the famous womanizer.

The music begins with a gallant smirk, with sweeping strings and sharp interjections from the brass and percussion, giving the opening a heroic flair. Before long, this fanfare gives way to a more intimate tune, a beguiling violin solo that heralds a torrid love scene. (It’s depicting exactly what you’d think.) The music soon builds to an emotional climax, and then the tone darkens. Here, Strauss introduces elements of the play “Don Juan’s Ende” by poet Nikolaus Lenau, including the protagonist’s ultimate resignation to his fate: death by the sword of his lover’s father.

As the Don's life extinguishes, his final, thumping heartbeats can be heard among plucked strings and timpani.

The orchestration of Don Juan is perhaps the earliest example of Strauss’ mature style, with bold, vivid writing that blends numerous instruments into dense layers of sound. His music is quite difficult to perform, with its many moving parts and constant shifts in tempo and dynamics.

As to the composer’s background, Strauss’ parents were a French horn player and a mother from a wealthy brewer’s family. (‘Twas the Hacker-Pschorr Brewery, for anyone curious. That brand is still served at Oktoberfest in Munich.) He wasn’t plagued by the same financial hardships that drove fellow composers to tortured soul searching; his was largely a charmed career that brought him fulfillment, fame, and fortune.

Still, there were shadows, a product of his time. As the Nazis’ power rose, Strauss’ distaste for the propagandist Joseph Goebbels would become legendary: “I consider the Streicher–Goebbels Jew-baiting as a disgrace to German honor, as evidence of incompetence — the basest weapon of untalented, lazy mediocrity against a higher intelligence and greater talent.” (He’d later called Goebbels a “pipsqueak,” but only behind closed doors.)

For his part, Goebbels despised Strauss’ work but admitted his skill was profound: “Unfortunately, we still need him, but one day we shall have our own music, and then we shall have no further need of this decadent neurotic.” Strauss would ultimately accept a cultural position in the Third Reich largely to protect Jewish family members, which he indeed accomplished through the end of the wars.

(c) Jeremy Reynolds