Strauss’s Don Juan

“My music is a reflection of my dreams,” Unsuk Chin has stated. “I try to render into music the visions of immense light and of an incredible magnificence of colors that I see in all my dreams — a play of light and colors floating through the room and at the same time forming a fluid sound sculpture.” For Chin, these dream images are not narrative in nature but perceptual: abstract, remote, and continuously shifting. Yet it is precisely through this abstraction, she suggests, that music can communicate emotion — “joy and warmth” — without relying on literal storytelling.

That dream logic permeates her Cello Concerto, a work that unfolds not as a linear argument but as an immersive soundworld in which time stretches and contracts, identities blur, and familiar musical roles are continually destabilized. This sensitivity to perception and instability is central to Chin’s musical outlook more broadly.

Born in Seoul in 1961 and based in Berlin since the late 1980s, Chin has built a career that bridges rigorous modernist craft with an unusually vivid sonic imagination. After early studies in South Korea, she spent three formative years in Hamburg as a student of György Ligeti, one of the towering — and most original — figures of late-20th-century music. Like Ligeti, Chin has never aligned herself with any single school or aesthetic, instead embracing what she has called a deliberately “bewildering” openness. That lineage surfaces in the Cello Concerto as a subtle homage to virtuosity pushed to its limits, fully absorbed into Chin’s own musical voice.

Throughout her career, Chin has returned to the concerto as a psychological and theatrical space — not merely a vehicle for virtuosity, but a forum in which musical identities are placed under pressure. Against this backdrop, the Cello Concerto occupies a distinctive place within her output. Composed between 2006 and 2008 for the cellist Alban Gerhardt and revised in 2013, the work diverges sharply from her previous concertos.

As Chin explained in an interview with David Allenby, in those earlier concertos she sought to “merge the solo instrument and the orchestra into a single virtuoso super-instrument.” The Cello Concerto, by contrast, is “antithetical” to that approach. Here, she says, “it’s all about the competitive tension between the soloist and the orchestra.”

Chin describes the “aura of the cello” as the initial nucleus of the work — a presence that “carries” the entire structure from within. Yet the orchestra does not simply absorb or support that aura. Instead, it responds “in an antagonistic way,” creating a level of confrontation that Chin considers more extreme than in traditional Classical-Romantic concertos. “One could even speak of ‘psychological warfare’ between soloist and orchestra,” she observes. Rather than a stable hierarchy, the concerto sets in motion a constantly shifting field of forces, in which the cello must continually renegotiate its identity.

Cast in four interconnected movements played without interruption, the concerto unfolds as a continuous dramatic arc rather than a sequence of self-contained panels. Only the opening movement — the longest — carries a title: Aniri. Chin explains that the term belongs to the traditional Korean genre known as pansori, an epic form of stylized musical storytelling typically performed by a single singer, and refers to the spoken narrative passages that frame and propel those performances.

Softly plucked, bardic harps dwell on a single pitch and conjure the scene, while the cello assumes an incantatory role, drawing us into this dreamworld through exploratory gestures that seem to search for orientation. The effect is not narrative in any literal sense, but atmospheric — an invocation rather than a story.

The music gathers momentum as it moves into a sharply contrasting second movement, driven by relentlessly motoric energy and a scherzo-like character. Here, virtuosity becomes a source of pressure rather than release, with the cello pushed into extremes of register and articulation, its lyric impulse repeatedly fragmented. The third movement withdraws into a markedly different space built around a hauntingly thinned-out chorale-like idea. It unfolds with a sense of suspended time, the soloist drifting upward into fragile, exposed registers.

The final movement brings the confrontation into the open, with the orchestra attacking in aggressive gestures. Despite the violence that threatens to dominate, the solo cello gradually draws the music toward a clearing of fragile lyricism that recalls the dreamlike, epic impulse from which the concerto first emerged. Chin draws the solo line ever higher in the closing minutes, the cello ascending against dark orchestral rumblings below until it comes to rest at the extreme high end of the instrument’s register.

— Thomas May

Thomas May is a writer, critic, educator, and translator. A regular contributor to The New York Times, The Seattle Times, Gramophone, and Strings magazine, he is the English-language editor for the Lucerne Festival.

In the series of symphonic tone poems that followed Richard Strauss’s “conversion” to the path laid out by Liszt, Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks is the fourth, following Macbeth, Don Juan, and Death and Transfiguration. Each one was, in general, longer, larger, and more complex than the previous one. The last of the series, An Alpine Symphony, finished in 1915, is nearly an hour long and requires massive forces, including an army of offstage horns.

Till Eulenspiegel was composed in 1895, when Strauss was assistant conductor at the Bavarian State Opera, having already established a reputation as one of Germany’s leading conductors and composers. He was busy and productive in both roles, and the energy that propelled him is clearly evident in this work. Strauss once boasted he could portray almost anything in music, and the symphonic poems’ subjects range from the contemplation of death to the humorous episodes of Till Eulenspiegel (translated as Till “Owl-glass”).

Till is a character of German folklore who gets away with a series of pranks until the law finally catches up with him, allegedly based on a real person who lived in the mid-14th century. Strauss picked a few episodes from the many recorded in ancient accounts and presented them in “Rondeauform,” which contributes a joke of Strauss’s own — the piece is not by any means in traditional rondo form, even though it has a series of non-recurring episodes.

As the piece opens, we learn that Till is an endearing character from the sweet phrase delicately presented by the violins. But the solo horn’s tricky rhythms tell us that he’s also a slippery individual as he sets off to have some fun. The real Till is soon revealed by a squeaky clarinet, landing on a teasing chord for oboes. The endearing smile we heard at the beginning was only a mask.

For a while, Till saunters along, looking for a way to amuse himself (the orchestra enjoys playing “ball,” passing his theme back and forth and around the stage). Eventually, he strides into the marketplace and, with a heavy cymbal crash and noisy rattle, he overturns the tradesmen’s stalls and runs off, leaving havoc behind.

Cautiously peeping out from his hiding place, Till decides to dress up as a priest. The music is solemn (rather than holy), and a series of slithering brass chords represent his alarm at contemplating the fearful punishments meted out to those who mock religion. And so, with a solo violin glissando from the top of its range, Till escapes and prepares himself for his next adventure.

This time, Till plays a cavalier, ready to woo any pretty woman who passes. Charming phrases fall from his lips, and he falls genuinely in love with one girl, who rejects him after seeing through the imposture. For a short while, he fumes and then forgets the whole episode by joining a group of argumentative professors (played by the bassoons). The discussion gets more intense, with Till’s teasing contributions causing them to turn on him in fury. A demonic trill on the oboe chord nails his predicament, from which he escapes with the jauntiest little tune.

At this point, Strauss recounts no more particular adventures, but instead brings the music to a recapitulation, in which all the themes are heard again in increasingly dense combinations. Till finds himself in increasingly hot water, and it seems the law is catching up with him. When the solemn preacher’s melody is heard again in the brass, the game is up. A snare drum supports the solemn deliberations of his judges.

The slithering brass chords tell us that punishment is due, and two brutal notes in the trombones, horns, and bassoons represent Till’s fate on the gallows. But as the final moments suggest, his spirit is not dead, and Till Eulenspiegel wins a new smile, even a guffaw, as his memory lives on.

— Hugh Macdonald

Hugh Macdonald is Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written books on Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, and Scriabin, as well as Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year.

Just exactly who is Richard Strauss’s tone poem Don Juan about? The mesmerizing, hyper-masculine seducer projected from tale and legend? Or perhaps … Strauss himself?

Much has been speculated about the autobiographical nature of Strauss’s Don Juan. For starters, the composer’s youthful affair with Dora Wihan — the wife of the Munich Court Orchestra’s principal cellist — burned brightly enough for a considerable time to be in constant danger of discovery. Add to this his parents’ ongoing worries, expressed openly in letters to their son, about Richard’s less-than-discreet liaisons with several young women in the towns he visited as a guest conductor. And, perhaps most poetic of all, Strauss first met his future wife, Pauline de Ahna, just as he was beginning work on Don Juan.

All of this, of course, provides rich material for biographers, but the truth is neither so neatly certain nor so picturesque. No one really knows when Strauss conceived the idea of a tone poem about Don Juan or when he began writing it. (Some sources suggest 1887, while others claim 1888.) More problematically, despite many open references in various letters, it is almost impossible, more than a century later, to judge just how far any of Strauss’s youthful romances may have gone, in the words of Strauss biographer Norman Del Mar, “beyond the point considered respectable by the society of those days.” All in all, though the 24-year-old Strauss clearly leapt to full artistic maturity with Don Juan — much as Don Juan the man himself leaps fully to life in the opening phrase of the tone poem — the “autobiographical” nature of this work (unlike that of several of the composer’s later tone poems) is largely the wishful thinking of over-romantic writers.

Strauss left no “programmatic” explanation for Don Juan beyond 32 lines from an unfinished lyric poem by Nikolaus Lenau. Lenau was a 19th-century Austrian poet who, in the early 1830s, visited the United States and lived briefly in Ohio while trying to capture a sense of the “frontier freedom” that this country symbolized in Romantic European circles. Disillusioned by the gritty reality of frontier life, he returned to Europe and tried to depict in his writing the kind of full-bodied poetic life he had been unable to experience.

Lenau’s lines about Don Juan echo a disillusionment with life’s realities not unlike the poet’s own experiences. This is not the indiscriminate seducer of popular legend; this is a man much more aware of the pain he causes and the emptiness he feels. This helps clarify Strauss’s intention: not to tell the outer story of Don Juan leaping from bed to bed, but rather to portray the story’s inner drama — the exhilaration and ultimate disillusionment in one man’s search for love.

The premiere of Don Juan in November 1889 catapulted the composer into the musical headlines and, in the words of Del Mar, established “Strauss once and for all as the most important composer to have emerged in Germany since Wagner.” The verdict was warranted: Don Juan stands as one of Strauss’s most perfect creations in the tone poem genre. Not one note is wasted, not one phrase is overwrought. The formal structure of the music is beautifully assembled without intruding on the work’s seemingly improvisational nature. Contrasting sections meld seamlessly together, and the whole piece ends well before any musical ideas might grow tiresome. Perfection of this sort comes all too rarely — for composers and performers alike.

— adapted from a note by Eric Sellen

Eric Sellen is The Cleveland Orchestra’s Editor Emeritus. He previously was Program Book Editor for 28 seasons.