" It is
no vague symbol for the poet of the sort created by "Orpheus" or "Tasso"
or "Mazeppa." It is Lenau's hero himself, the particular being Don Juan
Tenorio. The vibrant, brilliant music of the up-surging, light-treading
strings, of the resonant, palpitating brass, springs forth in virile
march, reveals the man himself, his physical glamour, his intoxication
that caused him to see in every woman the Venus, and that in the end
made him the victim as well as the hero of the sexual life. It is Till
Eulenspiegel himself, the scurvy, comic rascal, the eternal dirty little
boy with his witty and obscene gestures, who leers out of every measure
of the tone-poem named for him, and twirls his fingers at his nose's end
at all the decorous and respectable world. Here, for once, orchestral
music is really wonderfully rascally and impudent, horns gleeful and
windy and insolent, wood-wind puckish and obscene. Here a musical form
reels hilariously and cuts capers and dances on bald heads. The
variation of "Don Quixote" that describes with wood-wind and tambourine
Dulcinea del Toboso is plump and plebeian and good-natured with her very
person, is all the more trenchantly vulgar and flat for the preceding
suave variation that describes the knight's fair, sonorous dream of her.
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