Note 63 — RICHARD STRAUSS AND THE MUSIC OF THE FUTURE

In Feuersnot, it may be said, Strauss himself goes back for a moment to something like that old world. But he does not take it seriously; the quaint mediæval story is only a background against which he can display his passion, his humour, his irony. Wagner would have made a portentous thing of the Feuersnot subject; he would have discovered the profoundest philosophy and ethic in it. Strauss behaves towards it like a graceless, irreverent urchin in a cathedral.