Don Juan, Symphonic Poem, op. 20

Strauss was twenty-four when he wrote Don Juan in 1888, newly installed as a conductor at the court theatre in Weimar. The impulse was literary: Nikolaus Lenau's unfinished dramatic poem, published after the poet's death in 1851. The score took four months. Strauss at first printed three passages from Lenau's monologues in concert programmes, then withdrew them, wary that listeners would fuse musical associations with literary ones. A poetic programme, he explained, was an occasion for creating expressive form, not a description of events. The women of the poem have no names, only solo violin, flute and oboe.