Richard Strauss Symphonic Poem Analysis

Richard Strauss was born in Munich, Germany on June 11, 1864. He was born to Franz Joseph Strauss, who was regarded as one of the best French hornists of his time, and Josepha Pscorr. Strauss composed Don Quixote, technically known as “Fantastic Variations on a Theme of Knightly Character, in the year 1987 and it was first performed on March 8, 1898 in Colgne, Germany and was conducted by Franz Wüllner. It is based on the novel “El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Moncha”, which was written by Michael Cervantes and published in two separate parts, the first in 1605 and the second in 1615. The genre of this piece is called Symphonic Poem, or Tone Poem.

A symphonic poem is a piece of orchestral music that is based on a non-musical source, for example the content of a poem, novel, perhaps a painting or even a landscape. It is believed that Franz Liszt, an Hungarian virtuoso and composer, invented the form and the term. In a lot of his compositions, Liszt uses theatrics to parallel the non-musical emotions of his sources, “...the poetic idea is simultaneously the formative element.” Liszt also said that “when ‘the music does not develop intrinsically from within, it becomes ‘literature music’.” A symphonic poem does not merely copy its source of inspiration, for example taking the literal meaning of it, but the music creates its own “self” from the inspiration.

One of the best things about this genre, is that every composer who has worked within it has approached it a different way. Remarkably, when the same composer is using the inspiration of a novel for one score and then the inspiration of a painting to another, you see that even the same composer will differentiate in their musical design depending on their source of inspir...

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...sition, that some speculate, in mourning of Munich and the many, famous, opera houses which were destroyed due to bombing. This composition was called “Metamorphosen”; written for 23 solo strings, this piece was included in Strauss’ “Indian Summer”, which also included an oboe concerto and the Four Last Songs. Strauss never told anyone exactly what this piece was about, but many have speculated that it revolved around the happenings in World War II. Some think it is about what was mentioned above, and other think it may be about other aspects of the war.6

Richard Strauss died in 1949, but he will never be forgotten. Though he wasn’t the first, nor the last, to use the Symphonic Poem music style, his pieces are some of the most well known and memorable. His interpretation of “Don Quixote” astounded people when it was first played, and it still astounds people today.