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Updated: June 14, 2025
It is not easy, even for those who were aware from the very first that Strauss was not the spirit "pardlike, beautiful and swift" and that there always were distinctly gross and insensitive particles in him, to recognize in the slack and listless person who concocts "Joseph's Legende" and the "Alpensymphonie," the young and fiery composer, genius despite all the impurities of his style, who composed "Till Eulenspiegel" and "Don Quixote"; not easy, even though the contours of his idiom have not radically altered, and though in the sleepy facile periods of his later style one catches sight at times of the broad, simple diction of his earlier.
Compositions of the sort of "Till Eulenspiegel," "Tod und Verklärung" and "Ein Heldenleben," solidly made and yet both narrative and dramatic, place the symphonic poem in the category of legitimate musical forms. The themes of "Till" grow out of each other quite as do the themes of a Beethoven symphony or of "Tristan" or of "Parsifal."
The idea of an Indian Tyl Eulenspiegel going about the country making mischief recalls a great part of the adventures of Hiawatha or Manobozho; in fact, it could not fail to suggest itself to a believer in Shamanism, or pow-wow, according to which evil spirits and men like them are continually teasing mankind, out of sheer malice.
I must get acquainted with this mirror of owls, this modern Till Eulenspiegel. See what a glorious morning we have! It is truly a wondrous winter! what summer sunshine; what soft Venetian fogs! How the wanton, treacherous air coquets with the old gray-beard trees! Such weather makes the grass and our beards grow apace! But we have an old saying in English, that winter never rots in the sky.
"The Eulenspiegel," "The Four Sons of Haimon," "The Emperor Octavian," "The Fair Melusina," "The Beautiful Magelone," "Fortunatus," with the whole race down to "The Wandering Jew," were all at our service, as often as we preferred the relish of these works to the taste of sweet things.
To this day a Christian would be in religion a Jew initiated by baptism instead of circumcision, and accepting Jesus as the Messiah, and his teachings as of higher authority than those of Moses, but for the action of the Jewish priests, who, to save Jewry from being submerged in the rising flood of Christianity after the capture of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple, set up what was practically a new religious order, with new Scriptures and elaborate new observances, and to their list of the accursed added one Jeschu, a bastard magician, whose comic rogueries brought him to a bad end like Punch or Til Eulenspiegel: an invention which cost them dear when the Christians got the upper hand of them politically.
The subject of it was, in short, as follows: The watchman of the Nicholas Tower, who always spoke as a knight of the castle, wished to give his daughter to the watchman of the neighboring church-tower; but she loved a young tailor, who had made a journey to the grave of Eulenspiegel, and was just now returned, as the punch-bowl steamed, and was to be emptied in honor of the young lady's consent being given.
Mazarin would that she had sung and danced here in Stuttgart! She might have surprised the composer but New York is yet to hear Elektra as music-drama. But not Don Quixote, so full of irony, humour, and pathos; not Elektra, in the strictest sense of the word a melodrama, and certainly not the prankish and ever inimitable Till Eulenspiegel.
Now the first figure grows more articulate, romping and galloping into an ecstasy of fun. A certain spirit of Till Eulenspiegel hovers about. Out of the maze blows a new line in muted trumpets, that begins with the inverted triplet figure, and in spite of the surrounding bedlam rises almost into a tune. At the height the strange jest of the horns reigns supreme.
It is a clever imitation of the Wagnerian manner, except as regards the choruses, which scarcely rise above the standard of the Liedertafel; but neither at its production nor at an elaborate revival, which took place at Würzburg a few years ago, did it meet with more than a succès d'estime. There seems to be better work in 'Eulenspiegel, a comic opera founded upon Kotzebue's comedy.
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