Of the first movement Mr. Vernon Blackburn has remarked: "... the Campagna is absolutely destitute of scenery, its tragic secret lying, for the most part, too deep even for the modern explorer; its 'dim warm weather' is an attribute which exactly describes its general aspect of loneliness and locked quietude. These are the points which Strauss makes apparent in his music, and proves the constancy of that mood in the second portion of his Fantasia, in which he only completes the hidden tragedy of the Campagna—in the section which he has entitled ['Amid Rome's Ruins']."
In the third movement, "On the Shore of Sorrento," Mr. Hermann Kretzschmar finds (in the middle portion) a picture of the sea ruffled by the wind. "A boat appears, and in it a singer sings a genuine native melody, sprung from the noble sicilianos, which since the end of the seventeenth century have passed over Europe, journeying from the region near Sorrento." "The strings," says another commentator, furnish "a rich background for the sparkling flashes of melody which emanate from the other instruments, the whole being suggestive of a water-picture. The almost constant shimmer in the strings might easily be construed as a description of the restlessness of the ocean, over which the melodies of the wood-wind play like the glintings of sunlight."
In the last movement, "Neapolitan Folk-life," the famous song "Funiculi, Funicula," serves as the principal theme, announced by violas and 'cellos. "The finale is brilliant, tumultuous, audacious."
"'My desolation doth begin to make a better life.' Such," remarks Mr. Blackburn, "might have been the motto upon which Strauss has built the labor of this extraordinary work. He makes you feel through every bar how completely his musical spirit is oppressed by a sense of tragic thought which, if anywhere, is surely appropriate in the presence of the wreckage of that huge civilization which reached the zenith of its glory in the genius of Julius Cæsar."
"DON JUAN," TONE-POEM: Op. 20
This work is usually placed first on the list of Strauss's remarkable series of tone-poems; yet, though it bears an earlier opus number, it was actually preceded, in point of composition, by "Macbeth," op. 23, which was written in 1887, a year earlier than "Don Juan."
The subject of this tone-poem is the "Don Juan" of Nicolaus Lenau (1802-1850), and quotations from Lenau's poem are prefixed to the score. They are as follows:
DON JUAN [to Diego, his brother]
"O magic realm, illimited, eternal,
Of gloried woman—loveliness supernal!
Fain would I, in the storm of stressful bliss,
Expire upon the last one's lingering kiss!
Through every realm, O friend, would wing my flight,
Wherever Beauty blooms, kneel down to each,
And if for one brief moment, win delight!"
DON JUAN [to Diego]
"I flee from surfeit and from rapture's cloy,
Keep fresh for Beauty service and employ,
Grieving the One, that All I may enjoy.
The fragrance from one lip to-day is breath of spring:
The dungeon's gloom perchance to-morrow's luck may bring.
When with the new love won I sweetly wander,
No bliss is ours upfurbish'd and regilded;
A different love has This to That one yonder—
Not up from ruins be my temples builded.
Yea, Love life is, and ever must be new,
Cannot be changed or turned in new direction;
It cannot but there expire—here resurrection;
And, if 'tis real, it nothing knows of rue!
Each Beauty in the world is sole, unique:
So must the Love be that would Beauty seek!
So long as Youth lives on with pulse afire,
Out to the chase! To victories new aspire!"DON JUAN [to Marcello, his friend]
"It was a wond'rous lovely storm that drove me:
Now it is o'er; and calm all round, above me;
Sheer dead is every wish; all hopes o'ershrouded—
'Twas p'r'aps a flash from heaven that so descended,
Whose deadly stroke left me with powers ended,
And all the world, so bright before, o'erclouded;
And yet p'r'aps not! Exhausted is the fuel;
And on the hearth the cold is fiercely cruel." [142]
Lenau is said to have observed of his creation: "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 incarnate womanhood, 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." Elaborate and inexorably detailed commentaries have been written on Strauss's tone-poem; yet this brief exposition by Mr. Philip Hale is more truly illuminating than are the exhaustive excursions of the German analysts: