Don Juan, composed at Munich 1887-88, is known as the first of Strauss’s symphonic or tone poems, but Macbeth, Op. 23, was composed at Munich, 1886-87 (revised in 1890 at Weimar), and published later (1891). Don Juan was published in 1890. The first performance of Don Juan was at the second subscription concert of the Grand Ducal Court Orchestra of Weimar in the fall of 1889.
The work is scored for three flutes (and piccolo), two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, double bassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, kettledrums, triangle, cymbals, glockenspiel, harp, strings. The score is dedicated “To my dear friend, Ludwig Thuille,” a composer and teacher, born at Bozen in 1861, who was a fellow student at Munich. Thuille died in 1907.
Strauss’s hero is Lenau’s, in search of the ideal woman. Not finding one reaching his standard, disgusted with life, he practically commits suicide by dropping his sword when fighting a duel with a man whose father he had killed. Before this Don Juan dies, he provides in his will for the women he had seduced and forsaken.
Lenau wrote his poem in 1844. It is said that his third revision was made in August and September of that year at Vienna and Stuttgart. After September he wrote no more, for he went mad, and he was mad until he died in 1850. The poem, “Eitel nichts,” dedicated in the asylum at Winnenthal, was intended originally for Don Juan. Don Juan is of a somewhat fragmentary nature. The quotations made by Strauss paint well the hero’s character.
L. A. Frankl, a biographer of the morbid poet, says that Lenau once spoke as follows concerning his purpose in this dramatic poem: “Goethe’s great poem has not hurt me in the matter of Faust and Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ will here do me no harm. Each poet, as every human being, is an individual ego. My Don Juan is no hot-blooded man eternally pursuing woman. 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.”
It has been said that the “emotional phases of the story” appealed to Strauss:
1. The fiery ardor with which Don Juan pursues his ideal;
2. The charm of woman; and
3. The selfish idealist’s disappointment and partial atonement by death.
There are two ways of considering this tone poem: to say that it is a fantasia, free in form and development—the quotations from the poem are enough to show the mood and the purposes of the composer; or to discuss the character of Lenau’s hero, and then follow foreign commentators who give significance to every melodic phrase and find deep, esoteric meaning in every modulation. No doubt Strauss himself would be content with the verses of Lenau and his own music, for he is a man not without humor, and on more than one occasion has slyly smiled at his prying or pontifical interpreters.