Although Richard Strauss lived until 1949, his music highlights one of the significant debates of the 19th century: between “absolute” music, or music with no extra-music connections, and program music, or music based on non-musical ideas. While Johannes Brahms is often dubbed a symbol of the former, Richard Strauss became increasingly associated with the latter. His tone poems, a series of single-movement symphonic works based on a story or idea, illustrate this allegiance best. Abandoning traditional musical forms seemed natural to Strauss. As he wrote to his mentor Hans von Bülow, “To create a correspondingly new form for every subject, to shape it neatly and perfectly, is a very difficult task, but for that very reason the more attractive.” While the task may have been difficult, Strauss brilliantly merges unique ideas and literary concepts with preexisting musical structures. 

Composed in 1897, Strauss’s tone poem brings to life Miguel Cervantes’s poem Don Quixote. As Cervantes describes the protagonist, “Through too little sleep and too much reading of books on knighthood, he dried up his brains in such a way that he wholly lost his judgment. His fantasy was filled with those things that he read, of enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wooings, loves, storms…“ Strauss vividly evokes Don Quixote, played by the cello, and his sidekick, Sancho Panza, introduced by clarinet and tuba before the viola serves as his voice, as the pair set off on a series of adventures in the form of a theme and variations.

As the tone poem begins, muted strings and unusual harmonies illustrate the cloudy state of Don Quixote’s mind. In the first variation, we meet the object of his unrequited love, Dulcinea, through strings and woodwinds. The Don defends his would-be lady from menacing giants that turn out to be windmills tilting in the wind. He falls off his horse in a harp glissando. Another battle rears its head in Variation II, this time the army of the “Great Emperor Alifanfaron,” whose musical bleating quickly reveals nothing but a flock of sheep. Variation III depicts the Don in self-imposed penance in the mountains, chastising Sancho Panza for lacking values.

Yet another mistaken case of identity transpires in Variation IV, as Don Quixote fights—and loses—against a procession of penitents which he mistakes for robbers trying to steal a statue of the Virgin Mary. The Don is battered in Variation V, and conjures up a vision of Dulcinea in horn, harp, and violins to give him courage. In Variation VI, however, Sancho Panza tricks Don Quixote into believing wizards have turned his beloved into a woman quick with the tambourine—and loose with her morals. A wind machine propels the Don and his friend through the air on hobby horses in Variation VII. The pair float in an oarless boat toward a threatening watermill in Variation VIII, saving themselves at the last minute when the boat capsizes. Bassoons play the role of conversing monks in Variation IX, and in Variation X, Sanson Carasco, a fellow townsperson, disguises himself as the “Knight of the White Moon” and battles the Don into sanity. Don Quixote’s clarity of mind returns in the final variation, and as Cervantes writes, “Never has a mind died so mildly, so peacefully, so Christianly.” Strauss ends Don Quixote’s life with gentle music that seems to say, like the close of a storybook, “The End.”