Don Juan, Op. 20

Composer: STRAUSS, Richard
  • Strauss composed this tone poem in 1888-9. It was the second of his tone poems to be performed (though it was not the second he’d written). This work helped establish Strauss’s reputation as an important new composer.1
  • Strauss was appointed the Kapellmeister to the Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach in 1889. Strauss conducted the Weimar Court Orchestra in the premiere of Don Juan on November 11, 1889.2
  • Strauss dedicated this tone poem to his close friend since childhood, and fellow composer of the “Munich School,” Ludwig Thiulle.3
  • Strauss’s Don Juan was inspired by Nikolaus Lenau‘s 1884 retelling of the legend.4

“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 possess as individuals.  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.” 

Lenau, on his version of the Don Juan character5

Sources

  1. Bryan Gilliam and Charles Youmans, “Strauss, Richard,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed April 15, 2021,  https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000040117.
  2. “Don Juan, Op.20 (Strauss, Richard),” IMSLP, accessed April 15, 2021, https://imslp.org/wiki/Don_Juan,_Op.20_(Strauss,_Richard).
  3. Bryan Gilliam and Charles Youmans, “Strauss, Richard,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed April 15, 2021,  https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000040117.
  4. Ibid.
  5. Quoted in Ken Meltzer, “Don Juan, Poem after Nikolaus Lenau, Opus 20,” Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra (2020), accessed April 15, 2021, https://fwsymphony.org/program-notes/strauss-richard-don-juan-tone-poem-after-nikolaus-lenau-opus-20.

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