Fiery-Pulsed Libertine or Domestic Hero? Strauss’s Don Juan Reinvestigated

Confronting a late-nineteenth-century work such as Richard Strauss’s 1888-89 Don Juan: Tondichtung (nach Nicolaus Lenau) involves, first of all, locating a methodology and level of discourse adequate to the task. Today, when the traditional categories of music analysis strike us more as problems than as self-evident concepts, we would do well to stand clear of the temptation to simplify “modern” compositions of this sort. ¹ It may be that these compositions cannot be grasped in single-dimensional terms: they are not musical puzzles to be solved by the assigning of quick analytical labels. More often, these pieces present a network of processes—structural, generic, aesthetic, social—more in need of hermeneutic untangling than of solution in any usual sense of that term. Such processes often unfold in a nonclosed realm in which aesthetic suggestion and allusion can replace concrete realization. Rather than passing over such problems, analyses need to thematize them.