DCC SEALED Audiophile LP Strauss Don Juan

$

30

 

 

  Strauss Don Juan Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks   Stokowski

Factory Sealed DCC 180g LP
 

  Superb sound and an exceptionally stirring performance on the Don Juan, possibly my favorite. Hard to imagine a better one. 

The cover is in superb condition, with no serious dents, creases or wear, and no split seams.

Zoom in to read more about the recording and mastering of this LP.

Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, after the Old-Fashioned Roguish Manner - in Rondo Form - to give the tone poem its full title - was completed by Richard Strauss in 1895. He based his work on a story by Dr. Thomas Murner, which was published in Strasbourg in 1519. Murner, in turn, based his tale on actual historical fact, for there really was a Till Eulenspiegel. In the town of Molin, near Lubeck, is a tombstone with the following inscription on it: “This stone no one should lift up. Here is buried Eulenspiegel. Anno Domini MCCCL.” Also engraved in the stone is an owl with a mirror clutched in its claws (the English translation of “Eulenspiegel” is “Owlglass”).

According to his custom, Strauss at first refused to put in writing any programmatic suggestions for Till Eulenspiegel. But in a letter to Franz Wiillner, who conducted the first performance of the tone poem at a concert of the Gurzenich Orchestra in Cologne on November 5, 1895, the composer had this to say: “It is impossible for me to furnish a program to Eulenspiegel; were I to put into words the thoughts which its several incidents suggested to me, they would seldom suffice, and might even give rise to offense. Let me leave it, therefore, to my hearers to crack the hard nut which the rogue has prepared for them. By way of helping them to a better understanding, it seems sufficient to point out the two Eulenspiegel motives, which, in the most manifold disguises, moods, and situations, pervade the whole up to the catastrophe, when, after he has been condemned to death, Till is strung up to the gibbet. For the rest, let them guess at the musical joke which a rogue has offered them.” Strauss then appended three themes: the opening of the introduction; the famous horn passage, symbolizing Till, and the interval of the descending augmented seventh, under which he wrote the word “death.”

Later, however, the musical analyst, Wilhelm Mauke, prevailed upon Strauss to make these notations on his copy of the score of Till Eulenspiegel: “Once upon a time there was a Volksnarr; Named Till Eulenspiegel; That was an awful hobgoblin; Off for new pranks; Just wait, you hypocrites! Hop! On horseback into the midst of the marketwomen; With seven-league boots he lights out; Hidden in a mouse-hole; Disguised as a pastor, he drips with unction and morals; Yet out of his big toe peeps the rogue; But before he gets through he nevertheless has qualms because of his having mocked religion; Till as cavalier pays court to the girls; She has really made an impression on him; He courts her; A kind refusal is still a refusal; Till departs furious; He swears vengeance on all mankind; Philistine motive; After he has propounded to the Philistines a few amazing theses he leaves them in astonishment to their fate; Great grimaces from afar; Till’s street tune; The court of justice; He still whistles to himself indifferently; Up the ladder; There he swings; he gasps for air, a last convulsion; The mortal part of Till is no more.”

At the end, Strauss gives us a little epilogue, in which the motive of the introduction is repeated. It is as if to tell us that this was only a story, and Till was really not a bad fellow after all. But you never can trust this Till; even in the death he pays us a little prank at the very end of the piece.

Salome - Dance of the Seven Veils

Salome, the one-act opera which Strauss completed in 1905, probably caused a greater shock to the music world than any of his other works. The theme itself was considered extremely daring, and the famous Dance of the Seven Veils became almost a synonym in the public mind for licentiousness. Furthermore, the sensibilities of opera goers of a more conservative era were shocked by the horror and morbidity of certain scenes. Today, Salome is taken in stride, while its imaginative - though still fiendishly difficult - score is widely admired.

The opera is based on the poem by Oscar Wilde. Throughout the four scenes of the single act, a nerve-racking pace of tensest drama is maintained by both music and action. The Dance of the Seven Veils comes as the climax of the opera. Salome, yielding to the request of Herod, performs the seductive dance to the accompaniment of some of the most sensuous music ever written. At its conclusion, Herod promises Salome anything she may wish, and she demands the head of the imprisoned John the Baptist on a silver charger. The final scene of the opera is Salome’s long, impassioned apostrophe to the severed head of the prophet. At the end, the horror-stricken Herod orders his soldiers to crush her to death beneath their shields.

Don Juan

The oft-related adventures of Don Juan, the swash-buckling Spanish dandy, and his amorous affairs date originally from the sixteenth century. Since that time they have found their way into many forms of literature, art and music. The character portrayed by Strauss in his tone poem Don Juan, however, is slightly different from the lover we have come to know so well, for example, in Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni.

He was the creation of the early nineteenth century German philosopher and mystic poet, Nicolaus Lenau, whose full name was Nicolas Franz Niembsch von Strehlenau. Lenau, who wrote his Don Juan in 1844, was shortly thereafter confined to an insane asylum, where he died six years later. Another of his poems, a version of Goethe’s Faust, served as the inspiration for another well-known orchestral work, the Mephisto Waltz by Franz Liszt.

Lenau’s biographer, Frankl, quotes the poet’s own explanation of his Spanish hero, as follows: “My Don Juan is no hot-blooded Don eternally pursuing women. It is the longing in him to find a woman who is to him incarnate womanhood, and to enjoy in the one, all the women on earth whom he cannot possess as individuals. Because he does not find her, although he reels from one to another, at last Disgust seizes hold of him, and this Disgust the Devil that fetches him.” The disillusioned Don finally ends his life when, engaged in a duel, he suddenly throws away his sword and allows his opponent to kill him. As he falls to the ground, he mutters, “My deadly foe is in my power, and this, too, bores me, as does life itself.”

Strauss first read Lenau’s poem in 1888, when he was only twenty-four, and almost immediately he set to work on his symphonic realization. Though Don Juan was the first of his works in this form to be published, it had been preceded by another, though less successful tone poem, Macbeth.

Don Juan was written at Munich, where Strauss was third Kapellmeister at the Royal Opera. The following year he went to Weimar as assistant conductor under Edward Lassen, and it was here that he directed the first performance of Don Juan on November 11, 1889.

Three days earlier he wrote to his father, “Yesterday I held the first partial rehearsal of Don Juan. It comes off beautifully and to my great satisfaction I can see that I have made further progress in orchestration. Everything sounds magnificently though it is awfully dlifficult. I really pitied the poor horn players and the trumpeters. They were all blue in the face from the strain. Fortunately the piece is short. The sound was marvelous, of a gigantic glow and richness, the piece will make an enormous impression.”

The “piece” has made “an enormous impression” ever since that time. And everyone has been attempting to give it a definite programmatic outline, but all to no avail. Strauss merely printed some excerpts from Lenau’s poem on the flyleaf of the score, then left the rest to the listener’s imagination.

- Notes by PAUL AFFELDER
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This is a factory sealed record, long out of print. This record cannot be guaranteed against defects of any kind once opened. This item is only sold "as is".

 

 

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