Date of composition: 1896-1897
Duration: 40 minutes
“Symphonic poem Held und Welt (Hero and World) begins to take shape; with Don Quixote as a satyr play,” noted Richard Strauss in mid-April 1897. After working on the two contrasting musical portraits, Don Quixote and Ein Heldenleben, in parallel for a while, the Don soon took precedence. The creative, imaginative individual in conflict with the hardships of reality is the recognisably autobiographical underlying theme that the then 33-year-old Munich court conductor Strauss dramatises in oppositional fashion – at first in a bizarre, ironically fragmented manner, and shortly thereafter in earnest and with great pathos: two sides of the same coin.
Don Quixote offers an approximation of the Sinfonia concertante – that favourite blend, in the Viennese classical style, between orchestral work and concerto for multiple solo instruments. The strong association of the two protagonists, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, with solo cello and solo viola respectively, allows the focus to return repeatedly to the acting characters, even as the situations around them change drastically. From the vast array of scenes in the more than thousand-page novel Don Quixote by the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes, Strauss picked out only a handful of striking scenes, arranging them to create the greatest possible dramatic contrast. “Fantastic Variations on a Theme of a Knightly Character” – such is the deliberately cumbersome subtitle he gave the work. This implies a historical and emotional distance from the subject and suggests an original approach. Yet the label is somewhat misleading, for the “theme of a knightly character” with which the woodwinds open the work is in fact just one of several themes.
In any case, the principle of variation here refers less to motifs or their harmonisation; what changes is the expression and the dramatic context in which the themes appear. Strauss considered the variation form to have been brought to its historical culmination with Beethoven. As a means of “depicting the insubstantial phenomena within the mind of the knight of the mournful countenance,” he therefore quite consciously “took it ad absurdum, as a kind of satyr play,” as he once noted. The fact that a lavish, thirty-five-minute orchestral work places the absurd at its centre – and indulges in rough humour for much of its course – provoked early critics from the outset. Famous (or infamous) is the onomatopoeic vividness with which Strauss leads an atonally bleating flock of sheep through the sonic scenery, sets the wind machine in motion for the ride through the air, or has his protagonist repeatedly subjected to severe beatings. Even the usually sympathetic writer Romain Rolland commented that the new work marked “a step forward for the composer’s technique, but a backward step for his spirit.”
From the perspective of twentieth and twenty-first-century literature, the diagnosis might well sound rather different: shifting planes of reality, intricate plot structures, unreliable narrators, and pervasive irony – all those things that Cervantes anticipated four hundred years ago – have since become standard. Instrumental music, however, long lagged behind. The way Strauss, in the intricately contrapuntal introduction, gradually lets his hero lose his mind while reading tales of chivalry, gives him, in the great F-sharp major variation, a dream vision of ecstatic detachment from reality, and at the end accompanies him, full of empathy, on his lyrical final journey, is something that, in such intellectual sharpness and precision of feeling, had not existed before.