“I have already put together a very pretty scenario [i.e., for an operatic treatment of the part-historical, mostly-legendary figure of Till Eulenspiegel -- Ed.]," Strauss wrote in a letter, “but the figure of Master Till does not quite appear before my eyes.”
But if Strauss could not see Master Till, he could hear him, and before 1894 was out, he had begun the tone poem that he finished the following May. As always, he could not make up his mind whether he was engaged in tone painting or “just music.” To Franz Wüllner, who conducted the first performance, he wrote: “I really cannot provide a program for Eulenspiegel. Any words into which I might put the thoughts that the several incidents suggested to me would hardly suffice; they might even offend. Let me leave it, therefore, to my listeners to crack the hard nut the Rogue has offered them. By way of helping them to a better understanding, it seems enough to point out the two Eulenspiegel motifs [Strauss jots down the opening of the work and the virtuosic horn theme] [BUT SEE BELOW* -- Ed.], which, in the most diverse disguises, moods, and situations, pervade the whole up to the catastrophe when, after being condemned to death, Till is strung up on the gibbet. For the rest, let them guess at the musical joke a Rogue has offered them.”
*Strauss's "Eulenspiegel motif" no. 1
Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond.
*Strauss's "Eulenspiegel motif" no. 2 (played twice)
With the horn solo played by Philharmonia principal Alan Civil
THREE REMINDERS THAT A SPECIAL CONNECTION HAS
ALWAYS EXISTED BETWEEN STRAUSS AND DRESDEN
The composer hailed from Munich, and the Bavarian capital has a storied Strauss tradition, and he was at home in the musical capitals of the German-speaking world -- Berlin and especially Vienna, of course -- but the musical connection with Dresden was, well, something else.
R. STRAUSS: Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche
(Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks), Op. 28
Staatskapelle Dresden, Herbert Blomstedt, cond. Denon-Deutsche Schallplatten, recorded in the Lukaskirche, February 5-9, 1989
Staatskapelle Dresden, Rudolf Kempe, cond. EMI-Deutsche Schallplatten, recorded in the Lukaskirche, June 1970
Staatskapelle Dresden, Franz Konwitschny, cond. Broadcast performance, Aug. 7, 1959
by Ken
So, for starters, we've got three Dresden performances of
Till Eulenspiegel, same basic orchestra but pretty different performances, to which we can apply the wisdom left to us by that fine writer on music Michael Steinberg: that when it comes to the Strauss tone poems that seem to have "programs," do they really or don't they? I often worry that I'm not sufficiently up on the story-telling elements of even as short a piece as
Till Eulenspiegel, let alone the considerably longer pieces that would come, and even with one I love as much as I do Don Quixote, for proper appreciation should I be listening with my nose buried in a printed "program," which I hate doing?
So, it seems that Strauss himself took a pretty casual view of the program business, at least as applied to
Till. I still have to wonder, when we come eventually to the
Alpine Symphony and
Symphonia domestica, don't we really need to know what the composer thinks is going on section by section? I usually settle for taking in the "effects" I "get," with maybe the occasional glance at some sort of cheat sheet, but should I be more rigorous about all this? For what it's worth, as we make our way again through
Till, I note that there are really useful Wikipedia articles both on
the background of the character Till Eulenspiegel and
on Strauss's musical rendering. (We're not done with
Till, by the way.)
In case it hasn't been obvious, or you weren't here for the previous post, I should say for the record that I've already been referring back to Wednesday's "
Post tease (I guess?): Does music get wonderfuller than this?" Almost as soon as I put that post up, I realized that I didn't want to tell the story I thought I was going to about the day that had been marked by my happening upon Blomstedt and Karajan performances -- in totally different media -- of
Till Eulenspiegel and the Largo of Dvořák's
New World Symphony.
I thought I was kind of looking forward to sharing, um, what I was setting out to share, and had only been held up by the teensy-weensy complication that the story is pretty complicated to tell, and also pretty sensitive, so that unless I get it close enough to "right," I can't even
think of posting it.
What I think we can accomplish without an inordinate amount of fuss is taking a closer look at the wonderfulness of these two pieces, since this can take us into territory that the dozen or so still-loose threads of posts past were designed to nudge us toward: what it is that we're looking for from music and what it's offering.
IN A MOMENT I'LL SHARE THE BARE BONES OF THE "STORY,"
BUT RIGHT NOW MAYBE SOME MORE MUSIC WILL HELP . . .
Sure! Why don't we move on to our other "core piece" from Wednesday, the
New World Largo, doing basically what we started going above with
Till Eulenspiegel: listen again to the performance we heard in the post "tease" and setting it alongside some others, mostly drawn from the
SC Archive? For the record, while the Kempe-Dresden
Till indeed came from the archive, I just made the Konwitschny-Dresden clip.
Let me check what we've got stashed away to add to the Karajan-Vienna
New World Largo we heard last time. Then we can pick up on the other side of the jump.
