The orchestra
reveals us Don Juan's love affairs in all their individuality: first the
passionate, fiery relation with the Countess, quickly begun and quickly
ended; then the gentler and more inward communion with Anna, with the
boredom resulting from the lady's continual demand for sentiment and
romantic posturing; then the great night of love and roses, with its
intoxicated golden winding horns, its ecstatically singing violins; and
finally the crushing disappointment, the shudder of disgust. The battle
in "Ein Heldenleben" pictures war really; the whistling, ironical
wind-machine in "Don Quixote" satirizes dreams bitingly as no music has
done; the orchestra describes the enthusiastic Don recovering from his
madness, and smiles a conclusion; in "Also Sprach Zarathustra" it piles
high the tomes of science, and waltzes with the Superman in distant
worlds.
And then, though less fecund an inventor than Liszt, less rich and large
a temperament than Berlioz, Strauss was better able than either of his
masters to organize his material on difficult and original lines, and
find musical forms representative of his programs. Because of their
labors, he was born freer of the classical traditions than they had
been, and was able to make music plot more exactly the curves of his
concepts, to submit the older forms, such as the rondo and the theme and
variations, more perfectly to his purpose.
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