“TILL EULENSPIEGEL’S MERRY PRANKS, AFTER THE OLD-FASHIONED ROGUISH MANNER—IN RONDO FORM,” OP. 28
Till Eulenspiegel disputes with Don Juan the first position among the symphonic poems of Strauss. The opening of Thus Spake Zarathustra is colossal in its elemental grandeur; the death music in Don Quixote is incomparably beautiful; there are a few pages in A Hero’s Life that remind one of Beethoven at his best; the love music in the Domestic symphony is memorable; but Till Eulenspiegel and Don Juan are continuously impressive, each in its way, and are free from the suspicion of effects made for the sake of effect, designed deliberately to make the bourgeois stare.
The story is medieval and Rabelaisian, and the music is quite as broad as the tale. Clear motives typify Till, who can be traced from beginning to end. He “bobs up” (no other term can describe it) through every kind of repression and persecution; he is saucy and insouciant; he is comically repentant when at the last he is hanged, and his last faint squeak is very mock-pathetic.
This hanging is a deviant from the old story in which Till evades his doom and cheats the executioner. For some time the reviewers were in doubt as to whether Strauss had given warrant for the execution—which shows the weak point of “programme music,” for no one ought to have had any doubts upon the subject after hearing the change of style from glibness to utter dejection at the end.
Till Eulenspiegel’s lustige Streiche, nach alter Schelmenweise—in Rondoform, für grosses Orchester gesetzt, von Richard Strauss, was produced at a Gürznich concert at Cologne, November 5, 1895. It was composed in 1894-95 at Munich, and the score was completed there, May 6, 1895. The score and parts were published in September, 1895.
There has been dispute concerning the proper translation of the phrase, nach alter Schelmenweise, in the title. Some, and Apthorp was one of them, translate it “after an old rogue’s tune.” Others will not have this at all, and prefer “after the old—or old-fashioned—roguish manner,” or, as Krehbiel suggested, “in the style of old-time waggery,” and this view is in all probability the sounder. It is hard to twist Schelmenweise into “rogue’s tune.” Schelmenstück, for instance, is “a knavish trick,” a “piece of roguery.” As Krehbiel well said: “The reference [Schelmenweise] goes, not to the thematic form of the phrase, but to its structure. This is indicated, not only by the grammatical form of the phrase but also by the parenthetical explanation: ‘in Rondoform.’ What connection exists between roguishness, or waggishness, and the rondo form it might be difficult to explain. The roguish wag in this case is Richard Strauss himself, who, besides putting the puzzle into his title, refused to provide the composition with even the smallest explanatory note which might have given a clue to its contents.” It seems to us that the puzzle in the title is largely imaginary. There is no need of attributing any intimate connection between “roguish manner” and “rondo form.”
Till (or Tyll) Eulenspiegel is the hero of an old Volksbuch of the fifteenth century attributed to Dr. Thomas Murner (1475-1530). Till is supposed to be a wandering mechanic of Brunswick, who plays all sorts of tricks, practical jokes—some of them exceedingly coarse—on everybody, and he always comes out ahead. In the book, Till (or Till Owlglass, as he is known in the English translation) goes to the gallows, but he escapes through an exercise of his ready wit and dies peacefully in bed, playing a sad joke on his heirs, and refusing to lie still and snug in his grave. Strauss kills him on the scaffold. The German name is said to find its derivation in an old proverb: “Man sees his own faults as little as a monkey or an owl recognizes his ugliness in looking into a mirror.”
When Dr. Franz Wüllner, who conducted the first performance at Cologne, asked the composer for an explanatory programme of the “poetical intent” of the piece, Strauss replied: “It is impossible for me to furnish a programme to Eulenspiegel; were I to put into words the thoughts which its several incidents suggest to me, they would seldom suffice, and might give rise to offense. Let me leave it, therefore, to my hearers to crack the hard nut which the Rogue has prepared for them. By way of helping them to a better understanding, it seems sufficient to point out the two ‘Eulenspiegel’ motives, which, in the most manifold disguises, moods, and situations, pervade the whole up to the catastrophe, when, after he has been condemned to death, Till is strung up to the gibbet. For the rest, let them guess at the musical joke which a Rogue has offered them.” Strauss indicated in notation three motives—the opening theme of the introduction, the horn theme that follows almost immediately, and the descending interval expressive of condemnation and the scaffold.
The rondo, dedicated to Dr. Arthur Seidl, is scored for piccolo, three flutes, three oboes, English horn, small clarinet in E flat, two clarinets, bass clarinet, three bassoons, double bassoon, four horns (with the addition of four horns ad lib.), three trumpets (with three additional trumpets ad lib.), three trombones, bass tuba, kettledrums, snare drum, bass drum, cymbals, triangle, a watchman’s rattle, strings.