Don Juan

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.