{ program notes
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including Mozart’s immortal Don Giovanni. As an attractive young man about
town, Strauss had cut his own Juanian
capers, but, just before writing Don Juan,
he had fallen hard for the soprano Pauline
de Ahna, who eventually became his wife.
With love coursing through his veins,
he turned to Nikolaus von Lehnau’s
unfinished verse drama (published posthumously in 1851), which explored the
psychological roots of the erotic life force
that drove the Don.
Strauss prefaced his score with quotations from Lenau’s poem. Describing his
passion for living each moment to the
fullest, the Don says (in Donald Francis
Tovey’s somewhat antiquated prose
translation): “Fain would I run the circle,
immeasurably wide, of beautiful women’s
manifold charms, in full tempest of enjoyment, to die of a kiss at the mouth of the
last one.” Late in the poem, when his appetite for life has changed into disgust and a
longing for death: “Beautiful was the storm
that urged me on; it has spent its rage,
and silence now remains. … Perhaps
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a thunderbolt from the heights … struck
fatally at my power of love, and suddenly
my world became a desert and darkened.
And perhaps not — the fuel is all consumed and the hearth is cold and dark.”
The trajectory outlined by these two
quotations is the substance of Strauss’
tone poem. Don Juan’s impetuous spirit
is immediately introduced by the bold
explosion that opens the work and the
virile leaping theme for the violins that
follows. After this subsides, the solo violin
ushers in the first of two love episodes.
This boasts an ardent, luxuriant theme for
the strings: music of a sensuous passion
inspired by Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.
After another burst of his opening theme,
the Don takes off to seek new loves. Cellos and violas introduce the second love
episode, in which the solo oboe sings a
haunting love song of genuine tenderness.
But even this cannot detain the Don
for long. The horns call out a heroic
new theme, as he rushes off to a masked
ball, glittering with glockenspiel. At the
height of the festivities, the orchestra
suddenly plunges into a dark abyss.
Don Juan’s zest for life has vanished.
With a huge effort, he summons his
energies again in a recapitulation of his
violin and horn themes. But as he fights
a duel, the will to live expires in a great
musical pause. Over shuddering strings,
his opponent runs him through. Only
“silence now remains.”
Instrumentation: Three flutes, piccolo, two
oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two
bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three
trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani,
percussion, harp and strings.
L a mer (“The sea”)
Claude Debussy
Born in St. Germain-en-laye, France,
August 22, 1862; died in Paris, March 25, 1918
On September 12, 1903, Claude Debussy wrote from his in-laws’ home in
landlocked Burgundy to his friend André
Messager to tell him that he had begun a
new piece, La mer. “You may not know
that I was destined for a sailor’s life and
that it was only quite by chance that fate
led me in another direction. But I have
always retained a passionate love for her
[the sea]. You will say that the Ocean does
not exactly wash the Burgundian hillsides
… but I have an endless store of memories
and, to my mind, they are worth more
than the reality, whose beauty often deadens thought.”
By the time La mer was finished in
March 1905, Debussy’s whole life had
been turned upside down. In July 1904,
he left his wife Lilly for the alluring and
wealthy Emma Bardac, herself another
man’s wife; the two eloped to the Channel island of Jersey. Although Emma
and Debussy eventually contracted a
happy remarriage, Debussy’s marital
mess made him briefly the scandal of
Paris. Lilly attempted suicide, both
she and Bardac brought court actions
against the composer, and many of his
friends shunned him. Thus, La mer —
perhaps Debussy’s most passionate and
personal work — can be heard as not
only a musical portrait of the sea, but