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ALAN GILBERTONTHISPROGRAM

This program really celebrates the rich artisticrewards that come from the cultivation of mu-sical partnerships. We welcome back Christo-pher Rouse in his second season as ourMarie-Jose Kravis Composer-in-Residence.Ive long believed that Chris is one of themost important composers working today his music is not only masterfully crafted butalso intensely personal and it has been fas-cinating to watch the relationship betweencomposer and orchestra grow even strongerover his first year here. I am so pleased to fi-nally be performing his Oboe Concerto,which wed scheduled for performance almostthree years ago but had to postpone when asevere winter storm forced us to cancel re-hearsals and alter the program. The soloist forthese concerts, our Principal Oboe LiangWang, is responsive and imaginative in his approach to a wide range of music, so it has beenwonderful to collaborate with him as well as with Chris as we prepared for these concerts.This program also spotlights Glenn Dicterow, who has been the Philharmonics Concert-

master since 1980. Glenn really is a legend. He is the epitome of what a concertmaster shouldbe: one of the worlds greatest violinists, he brings his incredible musical point of view toeverything he plays, and palpably affects the morale of his colleagues in the Orchestra hehas helped make the Philharmonic the ensemble it is today. Many of my memories of hear-ing him since my childhood are of his performances of the great concertmaster solos, so I wasdelighted when he answered our question as to what hed like to play in his last season bychoosing Don Juan and Also sprach Zarathustra, two iconic works for the concertmaster. Theseperformances are only part of our celebration of Glenn and his Philharmonic tenure, and Ilook forward to hearing the warmth of his sound and his impeccable virtuosity throughouthis final season with the Orchestra.

The concept of the symphonic poem, ortone poem, may trace its ancestry to thedramatic or depictive overtures of the early 19thcentury, such as Mendelssohns Fingals CaveOverture or Berliozs Waverley Overture. As timewent by, composers derived influence frompaintings or other artworks. The repertoiregrew quickly, thanks to impressive contributionsby such composers as Smetana, Dvork, Mu-sorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Saint-Sans, Franck, and most impressively Richard Strauss.In 1886 Strauss produced what might be

considered his first symphonic poem, Aus Ital-ien (it is more precisely a sort of descriptivesymphony), and he continued with hardly abreak through the series of tone poems thatmany feel represent the genre at its height: Mac-beth (188688), Don Juan (1888), Tod und Verk-lrung (also 188889), Till Eulenspiegels lustigeStreiche (189495), Also sprach Zarathustra(189596), Don Quixote (1896-97), Ein Helden-leben (189798), and Symphonia Domestica(190203), with Eine Alpensymphonie (191115)arriving as a late pendant. He was drawn to theidea (as he would recall in his memoirs) that

new ideas must search for new forms; thisbasic principle of Liszts symphonic works,in which the poetic idea was really theformative element, became henceforwardthe guiding principle for my own sym-phonic work.

NOTESONTHEPROGRAMBY JAMES M. KELLER, PROGRAM ANNOTATORThe Leni and Peter May Chair

Don Juan, Op. 20Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra), Tone Poem (freely after Friedrich Nietzsche) for Large Orchestra, Op. 30

Richard Strauss

IN SHORT

Born: June 11, 1864, in Munich, Germany

Died: September 8, 1949, in Garmisch

Works composed and premiered: Don Juancomposed MaySeptember 30, 1888; premieredNovember 11, 1889, in Weimar, Germany, withthe composer conducting the Grand Ducal CourtOrchestra. Also sprach Zarathustra composed189596; score dated August 24, 1896; pre-miered November 27, 1896, with the composerconducting the Frankfurt City Orchestra.

New York Philharmonic premieres and mostrecent performances: Don Juan premiered December 15, 1905, Max Fiedler, conductor;most recently played November 3, 2010, at the Philharmonie Luxembourg, Alan Gilbert, conduc-tor. Also sprach Zarathustra, complete work pre-miered November 13, 1908, Wassily Safonoff,conductor; complete work mostly recently playedJuly 21, 2004, at the Bravo! Vail festival, DavidRobertson, conductor.

Estimated durations: Don Juan, ca. 19 minutes;Also sprach Zarathustra, ca. 34 minutes

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Don Juan falls near the beginning ofStrausss procession of tone poems, preced-ing Also sprach Zarathustra by a good sevenyears, and it is the first of his compositions toreveal his distinct symphonic personality.The extra-musical impetus for this work was

Don Juan, the famous womanizer of legend,whose libertine exploits were apparently bornin popular literature of the 16th century andthen embroidered through generations ofpoets, playwrights, and novelists. Strauss basedhis symphonic poem on a version of the talethat the Austro-Hungarian poet NikolausLenau had produced in 1844. Lenaus DonJuan is a Romantic dreamer, and his compul-sion to seduce and desert an endless successionof women derives from a deeply Romanticquest for the ever-elusive ideal in this case,to enjoy in one woman all women, since hecannot possess them as individuals. This mayseem a rationalization for bad behavior, but itwas a popular idea among the Romantics. Byway of precedent one thinks of Liszts A FaustSymphony, with its concluding, ecstatic hymnto the eternal feminine.Strauss traces a series of Don Juans ex-

ploits in this symphonic poem, with severalepisodes of love music conveying the dis-parate characters of the women he conquers.(During a 1904 rehearsal with the BostonSymphony, Strauss stopped the orchestra atone point with the admonishment, Gentle-men, I must confess that I did not intend thispassage to be so beautiful; that woman wasjust a common tramp!) Don Juan meets hisinevitable doom with a violent crash in theorchestra representing the thrust of a swordbeing run through him by a father avengingthe death of one of the Dons victims; his lifeslips away via a discordant note on the trum-pet. Thus the piece achieves its final tableau.

Strauss immersed himself in the writings ofFriedrich Nietzsche in the early 1890s andwas impressed by the philosophers attacks onformalized religion, which mirrored his ownopinions. Nietzsches philosophy had justreached its mature formulation then, as artic-ulated in his four-part treatise Also sprach

Zarathustra (published 188385). In this work,the philosopher speaks in a prose narrative (asopposed to the formalized style of traditionalphilosophical treatises) through the voice ofZarathustra, a fanciful adaptation of the Persianprophet Zoroaster, who spends years meditatingon a mountaintop and then descends to sharehis insights with the world. Most of the catch-phrases popularly associated with Nietzsche God is dead, Will to Power, bermen-sch or Superman appear as touchstones

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Views and Reviews

Eduard Hanslick, the generally conservative, high-handed, and greatly feared music critic of the Neuefreie Presse of Vienna, encountered Strausss DonJuan in 1892, and launched a subtle attack on thework at hand:

The tendency is to use purely instrumentalmusic merely as a means of describing certainthings; in short, not to make music, but to write po-etry and to paint. Virtuosity in orchestration hasbecome a vampire sapping the creative power ofour composers.These outwardly brilliant compositions are

nothing if not successful. I have seen Wagner dis-ciples talking about the Strauss Don Juan withsuch enthusiasm that it seemed as though shiversof delight were running up and down their spines.Others have found the thing repulsive, and thissensation seems to me more likely to be the rightone. This is no tone painting but rather a tumultof brilliant daubs, a faltering tonal orgy, half bac-chanal, half witches Sabbath.He who desires no more from an orchestral

piece than that it transport him to the dissolute ec-stasy of a Don Juan, panting for everything femi-nine, may well find pleasure in this music, for withits exquisite skillfulness it achieves the desiredobjective in so far as it is musically attainable. Thecomposer may thus be compared with a routinedchemist who well understands how to mix all theelements of the musical-sensual stimulation toproduce a stupefying pleasure gas. For my part,I prefer, with all due homage to such chemicalskill, not to be its victim; nor can I be, for suchmusical narcotics simply leave me cold.

in these volumes. Nietzsches ideas went tothe heart of human existence and aspiration,which he viewed (quite pessimistically) as an

endless process of self-aggrandizement and self-perpetuation, over which the much heraldedachievements of civilization morality, reli-

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Sources and Inspirations

Don Juan the fictional character we love to hate hasinspired artists and captivated audiences for centuries indepictions ranging from cruel seducer to hero that areoften a reflection of the social mores of the time. Strausssorchestral Don Juan based on poet Nikolaus Lenausdepiction of Don Juan as the Romantic dreamer andMozarts unrepentant womanizer in the opera Don Gio-vanni are among the most prominent on a long list ofworks inspired by the legendary rogue. Other notable de-pictions include Molires play Dom Juan ou le Festin depierre (1665), the final installment in his hypocrisy triol-ogy; Christoph Willibald Glucks ballet Don Juan (1761);and Lord Byrons satirical epic poemDon Juan (181824).The character has remained popular in the era of film,

most notably in The Private Life of Don Juan (1934), anupdated satirical interpretation starring Douglas Fair-banks; the swashbuckling Adventures of Don Juan(1948) with Errol Flynn; and, more recently, Don Juan DeMarco (1994), starring Johnny Depp in a portrayal ofthe lothario as a delusional and hopeless romantic.

The Editors

Top: Francisco dAndrade as Don Giovanni, by Max Slevogt, 1912

Left: Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Don Juan,1948

Above: Don Juan and the Commander,by Charles Ricketts, ca. 1905

gion, the arts stand merely as pleasant dis-tractions from the underlying reality of hu-manity. Strauss wrote to his friend Romain Rol-

land that Nietzsches text was the startingpoint, providing a form for the expression andthe purely musical development of emotion.Nonetheless, a sort of narrative does exist, andfollowing the stentorian fanfares of the worksimmensely famous introduction, textual indi-cations inscribed in the score punctuate thesections of the pieces narrative: Of Those ofthe Unseen World, Of the Great Longing,Of Joy and Passions, The Dirge, Of Sci-ence, The Convalescent, Dance Song,Night Wanderers Song. This last is some-times given as Song of Those Who ComeLater, the discrepancy coming from an ap-

parent misprint in the score whereby Nacht-wandlerlied is misspelled as Nachwandlerlied.The consensus is that the former is correct.

Instrumentation: Don Juan employs threeflutes (one doubling piccolo), two oboes andEnglish horn, two clarinets, two bassoons andcontrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets,three trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals, or-chestra bells, triangle, harp, and strings. Also sprach Zarathustra calls for three flutes(one doubling piccolo) and piccolo, threeoboes and English horn, two clarinets plus E-flat clarinet and bass clarinet, three bas-soons and contrabassoon, six horns, fourtrumpets, three trombones, two tubas, tim-pani, bass drum, cymbals, triangle, orchestrabells, chime, two harps, organ, and strings.

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From a Friend and Critic

The French author and critic Romain Rolland (18661944) attended the premiere of Also sprachZarathustra and remarked of its composer:

The whole of him is to be found in this work, hishighly poetic aspirations, and that harmonic andorchestral audacity which, in 1897 [sic], wasshocking to those neo-classical circles beyond theRhine whose gods were Brahms and the famousviolinist Joachim.

In an 1899 essay on Strauss, he summarized thenarrative of this tone poem:

In it man is seen, at first crushed by the enigma ofnature, searching for a refuge in faith; then, rebellingagainst ascetic ideas, plunging madly into the passions;soon sated, nauseated, tired to death, he tries learning,then rejects it, and succeeds in freeing himself from theanxiety of knowledge; finally he finds his release inlaughter, master of the world, the blissful dance, thedance of the universe, into which all human sentimentsenter: religious beliefs, unsatisfied desires, passions,disgust, and joy. Lift up your hearts, brothers, high, higher! And dont forget your legs, either! I havecanonized laughter; supermen, learn to laugh! [Rolland is quoting Nietzsche.] Then the dance movesaway, and is lost in the ethereal regions. Zarathustra disappears, dancing beyond the worlds. But hehas not solved the enigma of the world for other men: therefore, in contrast to the harmony of lightwhich characterizes him, is set the sad note of interrogation, with which the poem closes.

Richard Strauss, ca. 1904