Burleske

The Burleske in D minor is a composition for piano and orchestra written by Richard Strauss in 1885-86, when he was 21.

The work's original title was Scherzo in D minor, and it was written for Hans von Bülow, who had appointed Strauss assistant conductor of the Meiningen Orchestra. However, von Bülow considered it a "complicated piece of nonsense" and refused to learn it. He said the piano part was "Lisztian" and "unplayable", particularly for a pianist with a small handspan (Strauss says that von Bülow could barely reach an octave). Strauss rehearsed the work with the Meiningen Orchestra, conducting and playing the solo part himself, but then set it aside. He wrote to von Bülow: "[G]iven an outstanding (!) pianist, and a first-rate (!) conductor, perhaps the whole thing will not turn out to be the unalloyed nonsense I took it for after the first rehearsal. After the first run-through, I was totally discouraged."

In 1889, Strauss became acquainted with Eugen d'Albert, who liked the work, although he suggested some cuts and changes to the piano part. Strauss rededicated the revised work to d'Albert, who premiered it under its new title Burleske, at a convention of the General German Music Association at Eisenach on 21 June 1890, in the same concert as the premiere of Strauss's Death and Transfiguration. The word "Burleske" translates as "farce" or "mockery".

Von Bülow was still not impressed. In a letter to Johannes Brahms in January 1891, he wrote: "Strauss's Burleske decidedly has some genius in it, but in other respects it is horrifying." Despite this, he conducted the work that month in Berlin, with Eugen d'Albert as soloist.

Strauss was offered a handsome sum by a publisher for the rights to the work, but he was still not convinced of its merits, so he declined. He was no doubt influenced in his own opinion of the work by von Bülow's opinion of it. A quarter of a century later he wrote about von Bülow: "For anyone who ever heard him play Beethoven or conduct Wagner, who attended one of his piano lessons or observed him in orchestra rehearsal, he inevitably became the model of all the shining virtues of a performing artist, and his touching sympathy for me, his influence on the development of my artistic abilities, were the decisive factors in my career."

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