While ballet and musical drama were the favourite genres among composers interested in Don Quixote, instrumental music, save for a few memorable exceptions, found the theme less inspiring. One of those exceptions is Telemann’s suite Don Quixote (Ouverture burlesque sur Don Quichotte). The first piece of programmatic chamber music inspired by Cervantes’s novel, the work consists of a suite with an overture, the movements faithfully reflecting in their titles the episodes on which they are based. This is undoubtedly one of the finest 18th century compositions devoted to Don Quixote, although in 1761, six years before his death, Telemann was to return to the theme in his serenade Dom Quichotte auf der Hochzeit des Camacho.
From comedy to tragedy
The comic, humorous and burlesque aspect of Cervantes’s novel enjoyed great popularity in the 17th and 18th centuries, a period in which the work was almost exclusively read as satire. This tendency is most clearly observed in the operatic dramatizations of the novel, where Quixote is interpreted as the adventures of a mad knight rather than a work of profound philosophical thought. It was with the 19th century and the advent of Romanticism that Quixote began to be seen not as an adventure story, but as the story of a knight errant with a mission to change the world. Henceforward, Don Quixote would become a standard-bearer for the great moral values - nobility of spirit, courage, honour, virtue and pure, ideal love - that he believes should rule the world. Disinterested sentiment was the order of the day. From this time on, Don Quixote began to be known as the “Knight of the Sad Countenance”, an epithet already hinted at as early as 1813 by the Swiss literary critic Sismondi, when he described Cervantes’s novel as “the saddest book ever written.”
Works such as Don Quixote, by the Austrian composer Wilhelm Kienzl, which was first performed at the Berlin Court Opera on 18 November 1898, were, with their Wagnerian sonorities, among the first to focus on the tragic quality of the original text. Kienzl, who also wrote the libretto, was later to record in his memoirs the reception of his tragicomedy by the public:
“I should have remembered that the public does not generally care to be presented with difficult situations: what it wants is to be swept away by the action; it cannot - or will not - be made to laugh and cry by the same piece of music.”
The idealism of his Don Quixote is such that it does not baulk at self-destruction; at the end of the work, we see Don Quixote burning his beloved books of chivalry and flinging himself into the flames. The opera was a flop, causing the composer, who identified closely with the ideals of his hero, to abandon writing opera for the next thirteen years. In spite of the work’s artistic quality, it has failed to enter the repertoire of the world’s opera houses.
Only weeks before Kienzl’s Don Quixote, Richard Strauss’s symphonic poem Don Quixote: Fantastic Variations on a Chivalrous Theme, op. 35, was first performed in Cologne by the Gürzenich Orchestra under the direction of Franz Wüllner, with Friedrich Grützmacher as soloist. The work was performed again on 18 March the following year, this time conducted by the composer himself in Frankfurt, to a much more enthusiastic audience than at the work’s première in Cologne. The piece consists of an introduction and ten variations, each of which is preceded by an indication of the chapter of the original novel on which it is based. The theme-and-variation form allowed its composer to write for virtuoso orchestra as well as explore in depth the characters of the novel: Don Quixote is represented by the solo cello and Sancho Panza, his squire, by the viola. This instrumental characterization does not, however, preclude other instrumental combinations. Regarded as a masterpiece of the symphonic poem repertoire because of its great originality and formal perfection, the work showcases Strauss’s exceptional gift for orchestration, as well as mirroring the multiple layers inherent in Cervantes’s novel, from irony to tenderness, from high seriousness to the burlesque, from joy to trenchant and sometimes excruciating sadness.
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