Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, or in English, Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, is one of the most popular orchestral compositions of Richard Strauss. It is a symphonic tone poem, a piece intended to tell a story. The story concerns the antics of a rebel against society and propriety.

Like others of his works, it is something of a self-portrait. Behind his steely self-control lay an outlaw spirit. At least up through Elektra, he delighted in making heroes and heroines of disreputable characters, thumbing his nose at moral norms, and pushing the envelope of acceptable dissonance.

In its own odd way, Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks subverts the very musical traditions Strauss himself espoused.

Richard Strauss and the tone poem

Richard Strauss was son of horn virtuoso Franz Strauss. The elder Strauss loved the music of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, but detested Wagner. But as a member of the Munich Court Orchestra, he had to learn and play all of Wagner’s difficult horn parts.

Richard began to compose at the age of 6 and had composed 140 works before his 18th birthday. Most of them were songs or piano pieces, but he also composed a choral work based on Sophocles’ Electra and a violin concerto.

His first published work, Festive March for Large Orchestra, appeared in 1881 when he was 17. That’s about the same time he began to study Wagner’s music against his father’s wishes. He also came to appreciate the music of Bruckner and Liszt.

Over the course of his career, he composed ten symphonic poems, of which Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks (1895) is the fifth.

Franz Liszt invented the symphonic tone poem. He combined all the tempos, key-relationships, and meters of the classical symphony into a single movement. Of all his thirteen tone poems, only Les Préludes became part of the standard orchestral repertoire. Audiences and orchestras alike found them too complex.

In part to help audiences, Lizst provided a written program. Most people assumed that the program had inspired the music. Actually, Liszt wrote the music and then wrote prose to describe a story for the audience.

Strauss was a master of musical description. In Thus Spake Zarasthustra, he painted a sunrise. The bleating of sheep appears in Don Quixote. In Symphonia Domestica, he even described his breakfast silverware. Perhaps these descriptive touches explain in part why so many more of Strauss’ tone poems entered the repertoire and Liszt’s didn’t. And yet most of them are more difficult for the orchestra to perform than Liszt’s.

How Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks differs from most tone poems

Authority figures can come across as pompous and repressive. They can include government officials, church officials, craft guilds (or labor unions), academic experts, or music critics.

Critics who favored the music Wagner and Liszt proclaimed that music had grandiose philosophical and spiritual qualities. It could help composers and audiences scale the heights or plumb the depths of the human spirit.

Even anti-Wagnerian critics looked to Beethoven as a model of serious exploration of musical form. They overlooked the occasional raucous humor in Beethoven’s music, along with Mozart’s and Haydn’s. Everyone took artistic music very seriously.

Strauss’ first four tone poems are every bit as lofty and philosophical as Liszt’s. But he decided to rebel. What better way than to depict the antisocial antics of Till Eulenspiegel? Years later, someone asked him if he had any deep metaphysical thoughts in mind for it. He answered, “Oh no—I only wanted to give the people in the audience a good laugh for once.”

Typically, a tone poem will have a detailed program to guide the audience’s listening. Many of them seem ponderously philosophical. Strauss declined to provide a detailed program for Till Eulenspiegel. He wrote,

It is impossible for me to furnish a program for Till Eulenspiegel; if I were to put into words the thoughts which its several incidents suggest to me, they would not suffice for the listener and might even give offense. Let me therefore leave it to my hearers to crack the nut the rogue has presented to them.

Who was Till Eulenspiegel?

Till Eulenspiegel burst onto the German literary scene in the early 16th century. A book by Hermann Bote, published in Strasbourg in 1515 is among the earliest of 208 catalog entries in WorldCat published before 1600. Its title is Ein kurtzweilig lesen van Dyl Vlenspiegel geborẽ vß dem land zů Brunßwick. Wie er sein leben volbracht hatt. xcvi.seiner geschichten.

In English, the title is A short account of Till Eulenspiegel born in the country near Brunswick. How he accomplished his life. 96 of his stories.

Keep in mind that those are 208 catalog entries from various libraries. Some libraries may have cataloged the same edition differently. But who knows how many other editions are no longer extant or are owned privately?

Plenty of later writers adapted these stories and characters for their own purposes. WorldCat has 544 records for works published in German between 1800 and 1894. Strauss could have learned the stories from any one or more of these.

“Eulenspiegel” means owl mirror. Most iconography therefore depicts a peasant with an owl and a mirror. Owls are reputed to be wise. Alternatively, the medieval mind considered the owl the devil’s bird. So the name might symbolize wisdom in the guise of a fool, holding up a mirror to society. Or the devil holding a mirror to make everything look foolish.

Till Eulenspiegel may have been a real person who died of the Black Plague in 1350. A tombstone with that name on it exists in Mölin, Schleswig-Holstein. It may be authentic. Or it may have been inspired by Bote’s book.

The story goes that when Till died, he was placed in a coffin made from a hollowed tree trunk, as was the custom. As the people lowered it into the ground, the rope holding the end with his feet broke. His body slid out of the casket and landed upright. Given the life he had led, it seemed suitable to bury him that way.

His childhood

According to one story, Till was so mischievous as a child that all the neighbors complained about to his father Claus. Claus scolded him, but Till answered that he never did anything to anyone. He offered a test to prove it. He would ride quietly on a horse behind his father and the neighbors would all tell lies.

As they rode along, Till bared his buttocks and mooned all the passersby. And, of course, they complained. Till insisted to his father that he was just sitting quietly. So Claus moved his son to sit in front of him. There, Till sat very quietly but made faces at everyone. And, of course, they complained. Claus never actually saw Till do anything amiss, so he believed that everyone was maligning his innocent young child.

Till never showed any interest in learning a craft to make a living, but he grew bolder in his trickery.

Strauss’ tone poem

If it seems odd that the composer of Feuersnot and Salome would care about offending the audience for Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, one story I found online ends with Till defecating on someone’s tablecloth. So maybe it’s just as well Strauss spared the details of the stories he selected.

Although he declined to provide a program, he made comments in the score. From these, we can discern Till upsetting market stalls as he rides his horse through them, unsuccessfully wooing a girl, and taking his frustrations out on academics by asking cheeky questions they couldn’t answer.

The piece opens quietly with a five-measure prologue that suggests, “Once upon a time.” A raucous horn call shatters the peace. Strauss uses a clarinet to depict Till’s mockery. It’s not the ordinary orchestral clarinet but a shrill one pitched in D or E-flat, surely the most annoying instrument ever heard in an orchestra.

These two themes chase each other through various adventures until Strauss introduces his own disruption. All the stories end with Till in mocking triumph. Polite society and the law always tried in vain to punish Till. But not the way Strauss tells it.

Ignoring the story of Till’s death and burial, his music interrupts the high jinks with a drumroll and loud repeated chords depicting a trial before a very stern court. Unlike any published story, Strauss depicts the court sentencing Till to death. We can hear his hanging.

The quiet opening reappears for a while, as if to assure the audience of a return to a peaceful, undisturbed normalcy. But the mocking clarinet gets the last laugh. Till might be dead, but the spirit of mayhem lives on.

Sources:

Listening Guide: Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks by Richard Strauss / Peter Schiavo, Seattle Symphony Orchestra. May 23, 2019
Musical Pranks: Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel / Houston Symphony Orchestra. November 11, 2019
Richard Strauss: a life dedicated to music / RichardStrauss.at
Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, op. 28 TRV 171 / William Runyan. Runyan program notes.
Till Eulenspiegel: the crude pranks and hilarious hi-jinks of a 14th century German fool / Wu Mingren, Ancient Origins. September 30, 2018