Kienzl, Wilhelm

Preface

Wilhelm Kienzl – Don Quixote’s phantastischer Ausritt und seine traurige Heimkehr (from Op. 50)

(b. Waizenkirchen, 17 January 1857 – d .Vienna, October 3, 1941)

(Don Quixote’s Fantastical Ride Out and His Sad Homecoming)

Preface
Realizing his exceptional talents, Kienzl’s parents moved with their four-year-old son to the local metropolis of Graz, in order to foster his abilities on piano and violin. At 15 he took lessons from Mortier de Fontaine, a pupil of Chopin. Later, at Graz University he studied composition with Rémy (Wilhelm Meyer), and was influenced by Adolf Jensen, an important theorist. Jensen was also a champion of Schumann’s music, an enthusiasm shared by the young Kienzl that remained a prime influence in his own compositions. He spent some months in 1876 at Prague University and later the same year travelled to Bayreuth to attend the premier of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. In Weimar he studied briefly with Liszt and completed his formal education in Vienna. A number of engagements as a pianist and conductor followed, together with further musicological studies. After several years of this peripatetic existence, he decided to devote himself primarily to composition at home in Graz, resulting in the composition of his first opera Urvasi (1874).

Following the triumph of his third and most successful opera Der Evangelimann (1894) which became popular throughout Austria and Germany, with performances as far afield as Moscow and Istanbul, he embarked on his next project, an opera based on Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote. Upon its premiere, this work proved baffling to audiences and most critics in Berlin, who were expecting a work similar to Evangelimann. This one, however, was far different in scope and scale. The Italian baritone Mario Leone Fumagalli (who had sung the character of Johannes Freudhofer in the previous opera) suggested the idea to Kienzl who threw himself whole-heartedly into it, including writing his own libretto and supervising the production. He identified strongly with the title character of Cervantes’s novel, and chose the relevant scenes from the book—a mixture of comic and tragic scenes—as well as including some of his own material for dramatic reasons. To differentiate this work from its predecessors, he styled it a “musical play.” The work’s failure with the Berlin audiences meant that it received a run of only five performances, and only a few productions elsewhere later1. …

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