Unser neuer Gesamtkatalog

When Bertrand de Billy presented the first CD of symphonic works with the RSO Vienna, the release became the ensemble’s ‘business card’. “The Radio Symphony Orchestra Vienna has long stood under the shadow of the famous Vienna Philharmonic. Under Bertrand de Billy, however, it is creating a furor.” This was the judgment of Die ZEIT. With the RSO Vienna, Bertrand de Billy, who is leading the new production of Don Giovanni at this year’s Salzburg Festival, now presents Richard Strauss’s tone poems Don Juan and Aus Italien. Strauss was 21 when he traveled to Italy. The result was a symphonic fantasy that he did not want to have understood as a description of Rome and Naples. The music, he said, reflects his “sensations when looking at these beautiful cities”. Only three years later, with Don Juan, Strauss presented himself to the musical public as the consummate master of orchestration.

Richard Strauss: „Don Juan“ and „Aus Italien“

Even the beginning is unique in music history: the hero’s character is presented in eight frenzied bars, taking us from C major to e minor, with a bold turn via the main key of E major: incredibly full of energy, of boundless vigour, inevitable: Don Juan. When the violins’ brilliant treble presents his theme, surrounded by excited chord repetitions in the woodwind section, we have already been conquered by his charm.

That ingenious introduction to Richard Strauss’ tone poem titled Don Juan may well be regarded as a model example of a character portrait en miniature – a comparable piece in music history is rare, perhaps the only one being the beginning of Beethoven’s Fifth: the upbeat to the symphony as such. Don Juan: Programme music thanks to its direct imagery, although at the same time a masterpiece of compositional technique of the highest order.

For Strauss manages to shape a musical description of an image, apt, even manifestly immediate accounts of love affairs into a musical form that holds its own against any of the most important symphony and sonata movements of that era, namely the late Romantic period, in terms of its superior handling. Young Richard Strauss could not possibly accept that axiom that music did not have any content save for “musically moving forms”, as Eduard Hanslick, mentor of all opponents of programme music, demanded in his aesthetic maxims. Each bar, each note of his music “acts”, “narrates”, “means something”. And yet all the resounding actions always equally are part of an architectural design which retains sense and can be explained beyond any extra-musical narrative structure.

And thus, the “calling card” mentioned at the beginning could very well be translated with “Allow me to introduce myself, my name’s Juan. Don Juan.” – doubtlessly resulting in ecstatic looks on the part of the female counterpart. A musicologist, however, may be permitted to soberly refer to an introduction in eight bars which, as indicated above, lead from a “wrong” to the correct initial key with amazing vigour; a “cadenza”, although a cadenza in an unusual format that is followed by the actual “main theme” of the sonata movement.

The secondary theme then appears in the dominant key of B major, quite in keeping with the rules. It has its own lively spirit but is carried through by mellow lyricism – the poetic character trait of the lover, as innate to him as the virile, eruptive power of the beginning. Strauss allows us to hear this by presenting the “secondary theme” several bars ahead of time – in the first part of the sonata exposition, to put it in academic jargon again – quite abruptly we can hear the motif in the middle of tempestuous self-projection that in truth seems to have been interrupted after only a few bars, as if the hero’s ego had suddenly been distracted, very likely by the appearance of a female worthy to be conquered. Strauss’ finely differentiating tonal language is aware of even the tiniest nuances. The fact that his use of the classical sonata principle takes care of the greater context absorbs sudden contrasts, guarantees the most colourful life in detail within the formal brackets. This music presents itself as a delicately graded, resounding world of experience, almost on a bar to bar basis. The listener can therefore experience a miniature drama with breathtaking speed: Don Juan, his female counterpart, initially shy and cool, consequently fuelling his desire to conquer – the “secondary theme” comes to its first short blossom (at 01:00 in our recording). However, this beauty needs convincing. Don Juan pulls out the stops, mainly more subtle ones – the “secondary theme” suddenly blooms in mild, though seductively iridescent colours (02:12), increases to a level of unexpected power – only to finally arrive once more at the tempestuous manner of the beginning (04:23). This appears to be irritating: some hesitating figures in the woodwind section seem like a shyly presented rejection. Don Juan comes back with a passionate reply (a new motif in the cellos, from 05:04 onwards) whose ever more insisting surging is met with just even more hesitant answers.

Those tactics want changing. The oboe sets in with a love song of touching tenderness in the simple key of G major (06:10), taken over by the horn – Richard Strauss, the melodious composer, had one of his best hours here. He would not write such similarly tender and yet naturally swinging vocal phrases until his work on the Rose Cavalier. Strauss, a brilliant dramaturge, does, however, place his calm song above an undercurrent of continually pulsating quotes from the passionate motif of conquest: it is restrained by calculated cunning before it explosively breaks free (08:30) and almost catapults forward the final, most irresistible of all the Don Juan themes: the horns begin playing it in glorious C major (and do we remember the start of the tone poem? Even tonal weight is carefully balanced in Strauss’ work!). Triumph seems absolute (08:40). Don Juan rushes to meet new adventures. The listener is surrounded with a carnival bustle of disoriented hedonism (09:26) – the development passage of the sonata movement, as the iconoclast would note, with his preference for control of classical forms. Strauss’ artificial genius withstands such trials, too: the way the motifs of the previously introduced themes are reduced, shortened, and thrown together in a manner to create ever changing characters, much like in a distorting mirror, may well be praised as a technical masterpiece even without reference to all the picturesque associations. The over-motley crowd in which particularly the introductory theme and the horn theme that makes its way in again and again leads to a first breakdown (10:55) from which the hero, apparently, has to recover and make several somewhat nonplussed attempts (12:00) to regain his usual vigour. The recapitulation (12:19) is then limited to a return of the initial theme, again followed by a powerful variation of the horn theme (13:05), in E major this time, the key Strauss would prefer throughout his life when writing erotic, sensual music. Almost as if in ecstasy, a range of new melodic extensions of this theme now lead to a culmination when the main theme, deliriously condensed, caves in. The final passage, in an almost nauseated manner, refers to the last lines of the verses from Nikolaus Lenau’s “Don Juan” poem Strauss used as the subtitle for his score: “Perhaps a flash of lightning from those heights I scorned / has fatally wounded my power of love, / And suddenly, the world to me seemed desolate, deranged; / Perhaps not, after all – the fuel has been burned, / and the hearth remained cold and dark.”

His opus 20, Don Juan, suddenly made Richard Strauss appear on the stage of music history, and with this one work, he made an indelible impression. The tone poem, written in 1888, is indubitably Strauss’ work, from the first bar. His previous work consisted in partly brilliant, partly at least talented attempts to find his own language in very different genres. Don Juan, incidentally, may well be regarded as the composer’s creative overcoming of personal problems and surges of emotion. The Song of Liberated Sexuality was written at a time when the composer very likely was torn between two women. Willi Schuh, scrupulous biographer of Strauss’ early years, discovered that even during those months when Strauss was first introduced to his wife-to-be, soprano Pauline de Ahna, a general’s daughter, and came to love her, he still suffered from his passionate desire for Dora Wihan-Weis, a woman trapped in an unhappy marriage. He had known her, four years his senior, since 1883. Although we can only guess at how far their relationship went, Dora clearly is that woman Strauss’ passions seem to have been uniquely focused on when he was working on the composition of his tone poem in four movements, From Italy. Written one year before Don Juan, this work contains many of the seeds for those indubitably Strauss-like elements that were to come forth from the later work in such pure and uninhibited form. Hans von Bülow, himself a composer and one of Strauss’ patrons, and incidentally the man From Italy is dedicated to, quite aptly summarised the conflict arising from the music written by this young Munich composer for contemporary audiences: “Is it age that makes me such a reactionary,” Bülow rhetorically asks in a letter addressed to Alexander Ritter, one of Strauss’ close friends, “I do find that this brilliant author has reached the outer limits of what is possible in the tonal universe (in terms of beauty), and actually overstepped that border quite frequently and without compelling necessity. A wonderful, enviable mistake, this abundance of ideas, this wealth of relations (…) those colossal difficulties in the execution are what I find most lamentable.”

Bülow, ever the practical man, does therefore recognise the evident talent the 23-year-old composer possesses, and is aware of the young man’s original power of imagination. Pieces like A Hero’s Life, Salome or Electra give evidence that Strauss would continue to write scores that reached the limits of what is possible (also in aspects of technicality for the musicians). The fact that he exceeded limits also in terms of musical content and – above all – of form, will later, in the case of From Italy even generations later, be much criticised. In contrast to Don Juan, where he puts forth into the world a completely new, revolutionary musical sound which does, however, seem to have been harnessed to a classical, clear form, inspiration ranges freely in the apparently so classical symphonic form in four movements he chose for From Italy, perhaps more freely than may be conducive to the understanding and interior structure of the composition. And yet, despite all possibly justified compositional and technical objections, there are long passages of captivating, and captivatingly beautiful and skilfully developed thoughts in this opus 16.

Strauss himself wrote a musical summary of his tone poem for the “Allgemeine Musikzeitung”, something he would never do again in such an elaborate manner. This document is absolutely essential as a profound basis for any first encounter with the work. Let us therefore travel through Italy carried by Strauss’ own words: here we find ourselves in the first movement “In the Campagna”; a musical image which, according to Strauss, “reflects the mood the composer was in when gazing from Villa d’Este upon that wide Roman campagna lying under the blazing sun.” Strauss expressly called his Andante in G major a “prelude” in which he presents three broad themes with long draws of breath and then goes on to imaginatively interweave them (I: 01:14 , II: 02:30, III: 05:58). Vehemently increased quotes of the main theme bring about a jagged point of culmination (06:54) before we return to the calmness of the beginning via the lyrical secondary themes.

Some relationships between the individual motifs are very subtle and ingeniously used in that consequent manner of developing and re-structuring the composer inherited from Liszt. In fact, they do more than simply link passages in From Italy. Norman del Mar in his standard work in three volumes about Richard Strauss’ music pointed out the link between the Don Juan theme (track 1: 08:40) and the motif that appears in the front movement of “From Italy” as the third main motif in the various variations (track 2: 05:58). That octave jump up so markedly joining those themes follows us in the “Campagna” movement from the very first moment, as soon as melodious phrases are discernible from the landscape tableau of chords.

It is, slightly concealed by an additional note, also at the basis of the trumpet motif dominating the next movement, “In the Ruins of Rome”. This trumpet call we shall reencounter in a slightly different form in a later tone poem, too: Thus Spake Zoroaster. Here it is used to lead a Scherzo which appears rather of classicist dimensions in comparison to the colourful emotional image of the front movement and its broad increasing waves. It is reminiscent of the manner of the early German romanticists, quite obviously based on Schumann or even Mendelssohn, but led to a powerful peak by means of dramatic compression in the middle part (of the development, from 04:20) which del Mar apostrophises as an anticipation of that comparable passage in Don Juan. Here as there the recapitulation of the themes is effected after a veritable breakdown (from 07:30), although it is done in a much more conventional way. “Fantastic images of splendour gone by, feelings of melancholy and pain right in the middle of the sun-drenched present”, was Strauss’ own description, whereas he characterises the following Andantino in A major, “At the Beach of Sorrent” as an attempt to “depict the soft music of nature as our inner ear hears it in the rustling of the wind in the leaves, in the song of the birds and all those soft voices of nature, in the faraway murmuring of the ocean and the lonely song drifting over to the beach in a poetic, musical way, and to contrast it with the human emotion it meets with as it is expressed in the melodious elements in this movement. The interplay between the distance and partial unification of those contrasts is the intellectual content of this emotional image”, in which, one feels obliged to add, the master of many-coloured orchestra sound reaches his own first acme in his art as an orchestrator. The colouristic variety Strauss accomplishes was unrivalled in music history up to that point and even outstrips his admired example Berlioz and his virtuosity.

The finale is a veritable Tarantella based on themes Strauss jotted down in Naples. This “Neapolitan Song” is probably the most difficult one in this piece from the musicians’ point of view: they must, after all, ensure that none of the reluctant elements of that “mad orchestra episode” (Strauss) disappears in the whirling torrent of the colourful life of Naples. Or at least not until the crucial moment that the composer describes in his own words: “The Tarantella, initially heard from afar, gains the upper hand towards the end of the movement and concludes this humoresque.” The composer’s final remark betrays his intention; he was quite concerned with mastering a larger format of several movements, not just with picturesque evocation of emotions: “Some echoes of the 1st movement (in our recording from about 05:28 onwards) may express longing for the quietness of the campagna.”