Introduction
Till Eulenspiegel is the name of a young boy in a fairy tale written in 1511. We don’t know if he really existed, but in the legend, he was born in a small German village and became a known trickster: someone who played practical jokes on the people in his village. The adults in the village did not like his jokes and when things went too far, Till was arrested, tried, and sentenced to death.
Pretty gruesome, especially if you think this story was meant for children.
But we need to remember in which context these stories were told: fairy tales were often about dwarves, elves, fairies, giants, mermaids, or witches.
Their inherent violent component was meant to teach children the difference between right and wrong and the importance of consequences for bad behavior or bad people.
Richard Strauss engraved by Ferdinand Schmutzer (1922)
Sure you’ve heard of the most famous collectors of these fairy tales: the Brothers Grimm.
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected and published hundreds of such stories including
Hansel and Gretel, Snow White, and Little Tom Thumb, who appearss, for example, in Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite.
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Till the Don Juan
Till shakes off the death premonition and goes on on another adventure.
He transforms into a Don Juan, exchanging pleasantries with the girls.
Till and the philistines
The mood changes almost immediately as Till spots the object of his next prank: the philistines. They are portrayed by Strauss with a pompous theme played by the low woodwinds
You can hear Till’s mockery as he talks to them through the violins, marked, once again, lustig
The funny thing is that the philistines end up taking him seriously, even discussing his thesis. And what does he do? Mocks them of course!
Till the unstoppable
He eventually bursts out laughing, leaves the philistines to their own devices, and goes off singing a street song. It’s a short passage, a connecting bridge to the next section which goes back to the opening theme in a new form.
Notice the theme sneaking in in the bass line 6 before 27 and passed to a combination of English horn, 1 clarinet, 1 horn, and a trumpet ornated by the scales and arpeggios of the clarinet and the violins
And the horn is back, just like the beginning. Well, not quite. We go through a few changes and Till the invincible, the unstoppable, shines through a triumphant march. He even dances about it.
Trial and death
The excitement increases, the music grows and grows and finally Till finds himself in front of a judge
The trial begins and Till is questioned. But he whistles with indifference
The questioning continues, and Till answers again, and again, loudly and with a distorted voice
and then he doesn’t answer at all. The brass come back in full blown with a motive that was anticipated earlier
The judge sentences him to death, and he’s dragged up on the gallows. The flutes depict his last struggle before dying and his body falls through the trap and remains dangling on the rope
The coda sees the opening material come back. The “once upon a time” idea suggests that such a character cannot really die and in a swift return of the motive, we see Till’s mocking us once more
Technical tip
Strauss’s music can be very similar to Mahler’s in the sense that 2 hands are often not enough to keep up with everything that’s going on in the score. Hands independence is therefore essential.
5 bars after number 16, for example, you can register the violins line up and down with your left hand while using your right hand for the other line.
For a technical analysis of selected (risky) spots, look up the technical video
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