ABSTRACT
The only famous musical work since Mozart’s opera to be concerned with Don Juan is the tone-poem by Richard Strauss: Don Juan. Strauss prefaces his tone-poem with three extracts from Lenau’s Don Juan. In the first of these, Don Juan wishes to possess all women in a storm of pleasure; the second concerns his absolute need for constant change in love, his inability to ‘build temples out of ruins’; the final passage speaks of the death of all his hopes and desires, his weariness and disgust at life. Don Juan is in essence a musical theme, declared Kierkegaard, that is, fully realizable only through music. Strauss also projected an opera on the Don Juan theme, but the plan was never carried out, for reasons that can only be guessed at.
