Don Juan [antikvár]

RICHARD STRAUSS Don Juan * There is some confusion as to when Strauss actually began work on Don Juan. He himself wrote that on his way to Venice in May 1888 he invented the first themes of Donjuán in the courtyard of the San Antonio monastery in Padua. But since the work was certainly completed that summer this allows inconceivably little time for the composition of so elaborate and complex a score, and every biographer has accepted that the first drafts were sketched in the autumn of 1887. Strauss chose the verse play by Nikolaus Lenau as the basis for his study of that great erotic subject, not so much because of Lenau's dramatic handling of the legend, as because of his psychological approach to the notorious woman-hunter. Lenau's Don Juan traces the outlines of Don Juan's career from the scene where his brother Don Diego endeavours to fetch him home from his worthless life of sensuality, to the final duel in which he dies not because he is defeated but because he finds victory *as boring as the whole of life'. In every exploit it subsequently turns out that some great harm has been done, and Don Juan's attitude in the aftermath of catastrophe is summarized when, after he has desecrated a monastery, the Abbot destroys the entire building in his despair. Don Juan turns to his comrade with the words: That went too far, that I never meant; He who does evil ever does more than he intends. Strauss's treatment is reflected by the quotations with which he heads the score. All are spoken by Don Juan himself, the first two coming close together during the opening scene and forming the kernel of Don Juan's arguments for rejecting his brother's pleas that he return home without delay. The first excerpt proclaims his worship of the Isolated Moment: Fain would I run the magic circle, immeasurably wide, of beautiful woman's manifold charms, in full tempest of enjoyment, to die of a kiss at the mouth of the last one. O my friend, would that I could fly through every place where beauty blossoms, fall on my knees before each one, and, were it but for a moment, conquer . . . The central and most extended excerpt represents Juan's answer to Diego's warnings of his inevitable end as a beggar: I shun satiety and the exhaustion of pleasure; I keep myself fresh in the service of beauty; and in ofifending the individual I crave for my devotion to her kind. The breath of a woman that is as the odour of spring today, may perhaps tomorrow oppress me like the air of a dungeon. When, in my changes, I travel with my love in the wide circle of beautiful women, my love is a different thing for each one; I