I RICHARD STRAUSS

I

It is easier to trace the artistic lineage of Richard Strauss to its fountain-head—Johann Sebastian Bach—than to stamp with a contemporary stencil its curious ramifications. And this is not alone because of a similar polyphonic complexity, a complex of themes and their development without parallel since the days of the pattern-weaving Flemish contrapuntists; but because, like Bach Strauss has experimented in the disassociation of harmonies, and, in company with his contemporary, the master-impressionist, Claude Monet, has divided his tones—set up, instead of the sober classic lines or the gorgeous color masses of the romantic painters, an entirely new scheme of orchestration, the basic principle of which is individualism of instruments, the pure anarchy—self-government—of the entire orchestral apparatus. This is but a mode of technique and does not necessarily impinge upon the matter of his musical discourse; it is a distinctive note, however, of the Strauss originality, and must be sounded in any adequate discussion of his very modern art.

Borrowing the word with its original connotations from the erudite and clairvoyant French critic, Rémy de Gourmont, disassociation in the practice of Strauss is a species of tone chemistry by which a stereotyped musical phrase is reduced to its virginal element, deprived of factitious secondary meaning, and then re-created, as if in the white heat of a retort, by the overpowering and disdainful will of the composer. We have also the disassociation of ideas from their antique succession, that chiefly reveals itself, not in a feverish, disordered syntax, but in the avoidance of the classic musical paragraph—that symmetrical paragraph as inexorably formulated as the laws of the Medes and Persians, resulting in a Chinese uniformity maddening in its dulness and lifelessness unless manipulated by a man of intellectual power. Strauss is forever breaking up his musical sentences. He does this in no arbitrary fashion, but as the curve of the poem is ideally pictured to his imagination. A great realist in his tonal quality, he is first the thinker, the poet, the man of multitudinous ideas; you hear the crack of the master’s whip, a cruel one at times, as he marshals his themes into service, bidding them build, as built the Pharaohs’ slaves, obelisks and pyramids, shapes of grandeur that pierce the sky and blot out from the vision all but their overwhelming and monumental beauties of form—the form of Richard Strauss. He is, after his own manner, as severe a formalist as Josef Haydn.

We are now far away from what is called euphony for euphony’s sake; though it is, as in Bach’s case, art for art with all the misused phrase implies. Intent upon realizing in tone his vision,—the magnitude or validity of which we need not yet discuss,—Strauss allows no antique rubric of fugue or symphony to block his progress; even the symphonic poem, an invention of Franz Liszt, proves too cumbersome for this new man of light and air and earth, whose imagination is at once sumptuous and barbaric. The picture must overflow the old frames. It must burn with an intense life. It must be true. As a man who crept before he walked, walked before he ran, Richard Strauss has the right to our sympathy. He was a wonder-child; he is one of the world’s great conductors; he wrote symphonies in the Brahms style during his studious youth; he composed a little literature of chamber music, piano pieces, a violin concerto, and many songs prior to the time when he faced the sun of Wagner and was undazzled by its rays. He knew the scores of Wagner, Liszt, and Berlioz, has imitated, and has forgotten them in the swirling torrential tides of his own strange temperament.

Once music was pure rhythm; once it was howling and gesture. It moved up the evolutionary scale slowly and reached the kingdom of the instrumental arabesque with difficulty; on this side was the ecclesiastical liturgy with its rigorous inclusions and suppressions; on the other, the naïve young art of opera. Let us acknowledge that Bach was the crowning glory of the art polyphonic, that Palestrina closed the door behind him on churchly chants, that Beethoven said the last significant word in the symphony; let us admit these trite propositions, and we have still perplexing problems to solve. The song-writers, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, shall not detain us—they represent but an exquisite province of music. The neo-symphonists, beginning with Schubert and Schumann and ending with Brahms, are not to be weighed here. They said much that was novel, but they adhered to the classic line; they did not draw in the mass, to use the painter’s term. It is to Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner that the new movement should be credited: Liszt, for his prophetic power—he remodelled the symphonic form, but like Moses, he was destined to see, not to enter, the promised land; Berlioz, for adding to the instrumental palette new hues, bewildering nuances and bizarre splendor; Wagner, for banishing convention from the operatic stage, furnishing the myth as the ideal libretto, for his bold annexation of the symphonic orchestra and the extraordinary uses to which he put it. Yet only one of the three men has held out the torch to future composers—Franz Liszt. Berlioz’s talent was largely that of a perverse fresco painter; Wagner quite closed his epoch—one of rampant romanticism—in his music-drama, and by his powerful genius almost swerved music from its normal, absolute currents.

He quite flooded the musical firmament with his radiations. There was but one god and he reigned at Bayreuth; go hence and worship, or else be cast with the unbelieving into outer darkness where there is gnashing of teeth! The music-drama was the synthesis of the arts. It was the panacea of all social evils, and Parsifal we beheld as another Paraclete! Such arrogation of omnipotence was bound to encounter reverses. The Wagnerian mixture of words and music, of drama ranking before music and music playing the handmaid rôle of commentator, has stood the tests neither of its creator nor of time. We know our Wagner now; not as a philosopher—shades of Schopenhauer!—not as a poet—let us not invoke the spirit of Goethe!—not as a reformer, dramatist, revolutionist, but as a composer of genius, with a lot of wrong-headed theories, whose magnificent music floated his doctrines and blinded the younger generation to their speciousness. It is music, not drama, that rules in Wagner’s works.

The evil done was this: Music could no longer speak in her own divine voice without the aid of words, without the hobbling drawbacks of singers, stage pictures, plots, all the thrice-familiar mise en scène of the Wagnerian music-drama. Nevertheless, Wagner did enhance the value of the suggestion in music. He invented his own stenographic method of speech and with it literally created a new musical consciousness. A motive means something, is the symbol of an idea, or state of soul; yet we know that if this motive has to be accompanied by dramatic gesture or clothed verbally, then all the worse for it as pure music; it gains visually, but loses on the imaginative side. Before Wagner, Liszt discovered the power of the concise phrase and even labelled it; and before Liszt, came Beethoven in his C minor symphony; while antedating all was Bach, whose music is a perfect storehouse of motivation.

II

And again we reach Richard Strauss by way of Bach; in the music of the modern composer the motive achieves its grand climacteric. His scheme is the broad narrative form, a narration that for sustained puissance and intensity has never been equalled. The new melody is no longer a pattern of instrumentation, nor is it an imitation of the human voice; it is extra-human, on the thither side of speech. It is neither a pure ravishment of the ear, nor yet an abstruse geometrical problem worked out according to the law of some musical Euclid.

Now, music of the highest order must make its first appeal to the imagination; its first impact must be upon the cortical centres. It must not alone set the feet rhythmically pattering, it must not merely stir us to emotional thrilling. Not in the sensuous abandon of dance rhythms, but by thought,—that is, by musical thought, in a chain of tonal imagery, is the aim of the new music. Walter Pater believed, Plato-wise, that music is the archetype of the arts. It was an amiable heresy. But music must stand solitary—it is often too theatric, as poetry is often too tonal. It must be intellect suffused by emotion. Its substance is not the substance of its sister arts. What music has long needed, what Wagner and the church writers before him sought to give it, is definiteness. The welding of word and tone does not produce true musical articulateness. We recognize this in Tristan and Isolde, where incandescent tone quite submerges the word, the symbol of the idea. Erotic music has never before so triumphed as in this Celtic drama. And it is like the fall of some great blazing visitor from interstellar space; it buries itself beneath the smoking earth instead of remaining royally afloat in the pure ether of the idea.

The arts cannot be thus fused. When faith moved nations, the world witnessed the marriage of word and tone in the ritual of the church; no music has been so definite since Palestrina’s as Wagner’s—until the music of Richard Strauss was heard. In it we encounter a definiteness that is almost plastic, though never baldly literal. As we noted in our rapid survey, the ethic quality of Beethoven, the philosophic quality of Brahms, the dramatic quality of Wagner, are all aside from the purpose of Strauss. He seeks to express in tone alone. The new melody is but an old name for—characterization. And now we reach at last the core of Strauss, who is a psychological realist in symphonic art, withal a master symbolist; back of his surface eccentricities there is a foundational energy, an epic largeness of utterance, a versatility of manner, that rank him as the unique anarchist of music. He taps the tocsin of revolt, and his velvet sonorities do not disguise either their meagre skein of spirituality or the veiled ferocities of his aristocratic insurgency.

The present writer put this question to Herr Strauss in London in the summer of 1903: Has he always subjected himself to the tyranny of an ideal programme before composing? The notion seemed elementary to him. “All good music has a poetic idea for a basis,” he replied; and he instanced the Beethoven piano sonatas, the Bach fugues. But he admitted that his brain caught fire at poetic figures, such as Don Juan, Don Quixote, Macbeth; Also sprach Zarathustra, Till Eulenspiegel, Ein Heldenleben. Even a landscape or a seascape could provoke from him the charming suite of images we find in his Italia. With the poem of Death and Apotheosis, affixed to the score after the music had been composed, we may see that Strauss is not a man pinioned to a formula. But the effect on his hearers of his message, on those hearers who have submitted to his magic, is articulate as has been no anterior music. He moulds his meanings into a thousand forms—for what is form in the academic sense to this arch-disintegrator? And these forms resolve themselves into as many more shapes—shapes of beauty, terror, tragedy, comedy, morose mysticism, ugly platitude; into grimacing runes, shuddering madness, lyric exaltation, and enigmatic gropings; yet never the banal rhetoric of the orchestra, the rhetoric that has seduced so many composers to write for the sake of the sound, for the joy of the style. Strauss always means something. All is in the narration of his story, a story suggested with as much art as the inspiring poem; a misty cloud, perhaps, to the unsympathetic, a pillar of flame to the initiated. It is a new speech; notes, phrases, groups, movements, masses of tone, no longer occupy conventional, relative positions in his tone-poems. The violent disassociation of the old phraseology—his scores seem to be heard vertically as well as horizontally—smug harmonization, melodies that fall gratefully into the languid channels of our memory—in a word, the mechanical disposition of stale material is transformed, undergoes permutation to make way for a new syntax, a nervous, intense method of expression, strange elliptical flights, erratic foreshortenings, with classic and romantic canons cast to the winds; yet imposing a new grouping, a new harmonic scale of values, a new order of melody—the melody of characterization, the melody that pilots the imagination across uncharted territory into a land overflowing with feeling, intellect, tenderness, and sublimity, with irony, ugliness, humor, and humanity; a land not lacking in milk and honey, the land of Richard Strauss! A delectable region is discovered by this young man when we believed that the grim old wizard, Wagner, had locked us up forever in his torrid zone, where, like a Klingsor, he evoked for our parched souls the shadows of bayaderes and monstrous flowers and monstrous passions! Lo, another Richard has guided us to a newer domain, which, if not so fascinatingly tropical, is one where hallucinating chromaticism does not rule, where a more intellectual diatonic mode prevails. Strauss is master of a cold, astringent voluptuousness. His head rules his heart. Above all, he searches for character, for its every trait. He himself may be a Merlin,—all great composers are ogres in their insatiable love of power,—but he has rescued us from the romantic theatric blight; and a change of dynasty is always welcome to slaves of the music habit.

His music did not exhibit its first big curve of originality until the publication of Don Juan, opus 20. His intimate charming songs are the epitome of his peculiar dramatic faculty for clothing in tone, or rather emptying into music, the meaning of the poet. Avoiding the more recondite question of form, it may be said that as in the songs, so is it in his symphonic works. With no other indication than a title (he cannot be blamed for the extravagances of the analytical-programme makers), Strauss pours upon our puzzled and enchanted ears a billow of music terrifying at times: it is a veritable tidal wave; you see it cresting the rim of the horizon and rolling toward you sky high. His Don Juan and Macbeth are romantic in style, and for that reason are praised by those who fear to desert old milestones and wander in the tangled, fulminating forests of his later music. With the story of the mediæval German rogue, Till Eulenspiegel, Strauss unleashes his fantasy. It is a scherzo in form—how he burlesques the form and its very idea! The color scheme is daring, oppressively high, and at times we near the cosmic screech. All is prankishness, darting fancy, consuming irony. The humor is both rarefied and Teutonically clumsy. Till lives, Till is scampish, Till is gibbeted. Tone itself is volatilized into fiery particles that seem to fall upon the listener from dizzily pitched passages. Such a picture has never been hung in the august halls of music. It offends. It blazes in the eyes with its brilliant audacity, and yet it is new music, music gashed and quivering with rhythmic life. Rhythmically, Strauss is an adventurer into an absolutely novel clime. He touches hands with the far East in his weaving interior rhythms.

Death and Apotheosis is a tone-poem, rather Lisztian in its pompous and processional picture at the close. Its very title calls up the Weimar master’s Tasso. But it differs inasmuch as it is better realized externally, while its psychology, morbid in several episodes, is more masterful. It is not a Tasso, not a poet enthroned in deathless immortality, but a soul, the soul, which, lying in its “necessitous little chamber” of death, reviews its past, its youth, hope, love, conflict, defeat, despair, and at the end its feverish ecstasy, its sorrowful dissolution. Strauss with a secret tiny brush has surprised the human heart in travail. It is pathos breeding. The added touches of realism, the gasping for breath, and the lenten tic-toc of the heart, should not disquiet us. Æsthetic propriety is never violated. And Tod und Verklärung is hardly the greatest that is in Richard Strauss.

The much-discussed Thus spake Zarathustra is not, as has been humorously asserted, an attempt to make music a camel that will bear the burdens of philosophy; it is the outcome of profound study in the vaticinating leaves of Nietzsche’s bible. Its dancing lyricism is reflected in the Strauss score, which opens with a pantheistic evocation of sunrise, uplifting in its elemental grandeur. Seldom has music displayed a result brought about with such comparative simplicity—a simplicity in inverse proportion to its subtlety. It invites to the prayer of the sun worshippers as they salute their round burning god lifting in the blue. The composition is welded by a giant will. It contains so many incongruous elements, that their complete amalgamation seems at first hearing an incredible attempt. It is the old symphonic-poem form of Liszt, but altered, amplified. The themes appear, disappear, surge to insanity in their passion, melt into religious appeal, dance with bacchanalian joy, mock, blaspheme, exhort, and enchant. There is ugly music and hieratic, music bitter and sweet, black music and white, music that repels and music that lures—we are hopelessly snared by the dream tunes of this enharmonic fowler, who often pipes in No Man’s Land on the other side of good and evil. The ear is ravished, the eye dazzled; every brain centre is assaulted, yet responds to a new and formidable engine for stimulating ideas and emotions. The Old-World riddle is propounded and left unsolved. And we seem to have grazed an Apocalypse of scepticism in the conflicting tonalities with their sphinx-like profiles.

III

The greatest technical master of the orchestra, making of it a vibrating dynamic machine, a humming mountain of fire, Richard Strauss, by virtue of his musical imagination, is painter-poet and psychologist. He describes, comments, and narrates in tones of jewelled brilliancy; his orchestra flashes like a canvas of Monet—the divided tones and the theory of complementary colors (overtones) have their analogues in the manner with which Strauss intricately divides his various instrumental choirs: setting one group in opposition or juxtaposition to another; producing the most marvellous, unexpected effects by acoustical mirroring and transmutation of motives; and almost blinding the brain when the entire battery of reverberation and repercussion is invoked. If he can paint sunshine and imitate the bleating of sheep, he can also draw the full-length portrait of a man. This he proves with his Don Quixote, wherein the nobler dreamer and his earthy squire are heard in a series of adventures, terminating with the death of the rueful knight—one of the most poignant pages in musical literature. Don Quixote is shown as the quotidian type of man whose day-dreams are a bridge leading to the drab and sorrowful cell of madness. He is not mocked, but tenderly treated, by Strauss. It is upon the broad-backed Sancho Panza that the composer unlooses his quiver of humorous arrows. The score is thus far—to my taste—the greatest of its maker, the noblest in subject-matter, in dignity of theme, complexity of handling, and synthetic power. To show his independence of all musical form, Strauss selected the most worn—the theme with variations. Amazing is the outcome. No other composer before him, not even the master variationist, Brahms, has so juggled and deployed the entire range of musical material in serried battalions. Virtuosity there is, but it is the virtuosity that serves a psychologist; never is there display for decoration’s idle use. All is realistic fancy. A solo violoncello and a solo viola represent the half-cracked pair of Cervantes. The madness of Quixote is indicated by a device musically and psychologically unique. His theme, his character, goes to pieces in mid-air, after the mania of romance reading. The muting of the instruments and general muddling of ideas make the picture of slow-creeping derangement painfully true. Then follow variations, close in their fidelity to the story, and never unmindful of the medium in which it is told. Despite the disquieting verisimilitude of the wind-machine, of the sheep, Strauss has never put forth his astoundingly imaginative powers to such purpose. We are stunned, horrified, piqued, yet always enthralled by this masterful ironist who has conserved his mental sincerity. The finale is soothing, its facture is a miracle of tonal values. Don Quixote, until he surpasses it, will remain a monument to Richard Strauss.

The Hero’s Life is nearer the symphony in a formal sense than any of his newer works. It is his most robust composition. The conception is breath-catching, for it is a chant of the Ego, the tableau of Strauss’s soul exposed as objectively as Walt Whitman’s when he sang of his Me. The general outline of the work is colossal; it has no wavering contours, and is virile with a virility that shocks. It flouts the critics of the composer and shows a stupendous battle-piece, Tolstoyian in fury, duration, and breadth. Cacophony rules; yet is not a battle always cacophonous? The old-fashioned symbols of trumpet-blasts with ornamental passage-work are here rudely disclaimed; war is cruel, and this episode is repulsive in its aural cruelty. The ancient harmonic order will be indeed changed when such a tonal conflict is accepted by the rear-guard. Often we cannot hear the music because of the score. For the rest, there are apposite quotations from the composer’s earlier works, and the coda is beautiful with its supreme peace, supreme absorption in Nirvana.

This, then, has Richard Strauss accomplished: He has restored to instrumental music its rightful sovereignty; it need fear no longer the encroachment of music-drama, at best a bastard art. Enlarged, its eloquence enormously intensified, its capacity for rare, subtle beauty increased tenfold, the modern orchestra has been literally enfranchised by Strauss from the house of operatic bondage. He has revolutionized symphonic music by breaking down its formal barriers, and he has filled his tone-poems with a new and diverse content. In less than an hour he concentrates, relates, makes us see, feel, and hear more than could be seen, heard, or felt in a music-drama enduring six. His musical themes, quâ themes, are not to be matched with Beethoven’s, his melodic invention deviates from the classic prettiness; yet because of his incomparable architectonics, of his majestic grip on the emotional, he keeps us hypnotized as his stately, fantastic tonal structures slowly uprise and unfold like many-colored smoke from the incantations of legendary Eastern genii. He absorbs absolutely our consciousness with a new quintessence of poetic, pictorial, sculptural, and metaphysical art. Music, unaided by words or theatric device,—for the compositions of Strauss may be enjoyed without their titles,—has never been so articulate, so dangerously definite, so insidiously cerebral. Madness may lie that way; but the flaming magic of the man is ever restrained by deep artistic reverence. We catch glimpses of vast vistas where dissonance is king; slow, iron twilights in which trail the enigmatic figures of another world; there are often more moons than one in the blood-red skies of his icy landscapes; yet the sacred boundaries of music are never overstepped. Little matters the niche awarded this composer by posterity—Richard Strauss is the musical enchanter of our day.

IV

Richard Strauss was born at Munich, June 11, 1864. He is the son of Franz S. Strauss, formerly first horn player in the Bavarian Court Band. His father has written studies and other compositions for his instrument; and, as his son said, “he could play most of the instruments in the orchestra.” He sat under Wagner’s stick, but was not a Wagnerian. Once he played so well that Wagner exclaimed, “I fancy after all, Strauss, you cannot be such an anti-Wagnerian as they make out, for you play my music so beautifully.” “What has that got to do with it?” answered the stubborn artist. The mother of Richard was born Pschorr, and is a daughter of the wealthy Munich brewer. The boy received his first piano lessons at the age of four and a half from his mother. Later he studied with August Tombo, a harp player, and took up the violin under Benno Walter. At the age of six he composed a three-part song, a valse, and a polka—Schneider Polka, he called the dance. Before he went to school he had tried his hand at songs, piano pieces, and an orchestral overture. Sent to the elementary schools from 1870 to 1874, the gymnasium from 1874 to 1882, and the university from 1882 to 1884, Strauss laid the foundation of a comprehensive culture, a catholicity in taste, a love of belles lettres, and a general knowledge of the world’s literature. He early mastered the technics of the piano and violin, and in 1875, with Kapellmeister Fr. W. Meyer, theory and composition. This course lasted five years. The composing went on apace. A chorus for the Electra of Sophocles and a festival chorus were given a hearing at a gymnasium concert. Three of his songs were sung in 1880; and in March, 1881, his string quartet in A, opus 2, the scherzo of which he wrote in his fifteenth year, was played by Benno Walter’s quartet, to whom it was dedicated. Four days later his first symphony was accorded a hearing under Hermann Levi, and the extreme youth of the composer called forth remonstrances. In 1883 Berlin heard his C minor overture under Radecke. Both are still in manuscript.

Of this formative period Strauss has told us that, “My father kept me very strictly to the old masters, in whose compositions I had a thorough grounding. You cannot appreciate Wagner and the moderns unless you pass through this grounding in the classics. Young composers bring me voluminous manuscripts for my opinion on their productions. In looking at them I find that they generally want to begin where Wagner left off. I say to all such, ‘My good young man, go home and study the works of Bach, the symphonies of Haydn, of Mozart, of Beethoven, and when you have mastered these art works come to me again.’ Without thoroughly understanding the significance of the development from Haydn, via Mozart and Beethoven, to Wagner, these youngsters cannot appreciate at their proper worth either the music of Wagner or of his predecessors. ‘What an extraordinary thing for Richard Strauss to say,’ these young men remark, but I only give them the advice gained by my own experience.”

Then came a stroke of luck. Von Bülow’s attention being attracted by the charmingly written and scored serenade (opus 7) in E flat for thirteen wind instruments, secured it for the repertory of the Meiningen orchestra. It is scored for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, four horns, two bassoons, and contrabassoon (or bass tuba). His second symphony in F minor was composed during the season of 1883-1884. It was first played in New York under Theodore Thomas, December 15, 1884, and later by Walter Damrosch. It shows many traces of the young composer’s close study of Brahms. The horn concerto, opus 11, and the piano quartet, opus 13, were composed at the same period. The latter won a prize. It shows a straining for bigger effects, as if the form were too cramped for the strenuous composer. The andante and scherzo are the more agreeable movements. The Wanderer’s Sturmlied, after Goethe’s poem, beginning, “Wen du nicht Verlässest, Genius,” revealed the taste for literary themes and themes that exalt the individuality. This opus 14 is written for six-voiced chorus, two soprani, one alto, one tenor, two bassi, and orchestra. It also shows the serious influence of the Brahms Schicksalslied. A second suite for wind was first given at Munich, conducted by the composer.

“Bülow, who was very fond of my father,” says Strauss, “interested himself in me, and I have much to thank him for. He started me on my conducting career. My first experience of standing before an orchestra was in connection with the performance of a suite, in four movements, for wind instruments, which I had composed at his request. It is still in manuscript. Bülow made me conduct it without any rehearsal!” This must be the grand suite in B flat, misleadingly numbered opus 14—the same opus number as the Sturmlied. It is scored for thirteen wind instruments, and has been heard in London. The introduction and entire fourth movement are said to be the best. It is early Strauss. Strauss became music director in Meiningen, October, 1885, conducted his own F minor symphony and also made his début as pianist in Mozart’s C minor concerto. Von Bülow honored him by conducting the concerto.

Strauss had already come under the influence of Alexander Ritter (1833-1896), a violinist in the Munich Orchestra who had married a niece of Wagner’s. Ritter, like von Bülow, was a man of strong magnetic personality, and both were warm-blooded Wagnerians and Lisztians. As boys they listened to that wonderful performance of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony given by Wagner at Dresden in 1849, and the two young gentlemen schoolfellows used to doff their caps every time they passed the master’s windows in the Ostra-Allee. “Ritter was exceptionally well read in all the philosophers, ancient and modern, and a man of the highest culture. His influence,” says Strauss, “was in the nature of a storm-wind. He urged me on to the development of the poetic, the expressive, in music, as exemplified in the works of Liszt, Wagner, and Berlioz. My symphonic fantasia, Aus Italien, is the connecting link with the old and the new methods.” The young composer went to Rome and Naples in the spring of 1886. Strauss tells an amusing incident. “A few days ago I was conducting this symphony at Brunswick, when a policeman appeared on the scene and stopped the performance because, as he said, some condition had not been complied with. Soon after, however, another policeman came and said the concert might proceed. This unwarrantable interruption caused great uproar, and the audience shouted anathemas against the police. At the close of the symphony I turned to the audience and said, ‘You see, ladies and gentlemen, in this Italy there are no anarchists!’”

In 1886 he left Meiningen to become third Kapellmeister under Levi and Fischer. He wrote his tone-poem Macbeth at this period, though it bears a later opus number than Don Juan. The former, after a revision and partial rewriting, was dedicated to Alexander Ritter, and first performed under von Bülow in Berlin. Strauss remained at Munich until 1890, when he received a call from Weimar. In the ducal city he shed his pupil’s skin and developed into a brilliant conductor. His radical tendencies were now beginning to be recognized, and his espousal of the music of the extreme Left caused his conducting of Wagner and Liszt to become notable. At Leipsic his influence was felt as conductor at the Liszt society. He has always warmly defended the music of Wagner, Liszt, and Berlioz.

In 1892 his lungs were affected and a protracted journey to Greece, Egypt, and Sicily was necessary. He was not idle, however, for on his return his grand opera, Guntram, opus 25, and dedicated to his parents, was produced at Weimar. He married in 1894 Pauline de Ahna, the daughter of a well-known Bavarian general, and the soprano who created the Freihild in Guntram.

From Weimar Strauss returned to Munich as Court Kapellmeister, and three years later he succeeded Levi as general music director. Not satisfied with matters, he left Munich to become Kapellmeister at the Berlin Royal Opera, which position he still occupies. He had conducted the Philharmonic Orchestra of Berlin after the death of von Bülow, but the trip from Munich to Berlin was too exhausting, and Arthur Nikisch was permanently engaged. Strauss has conducted at Bayreuth, festivals at Liège, Cologne, Leipsic, Milan, Moscow. In 1897 he visited London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Barcelona, and a year later Zurich and Madrid. In 1903 he conducted, in conjunction with Wilhelm Mengelberg, a series of concerts in London, a Strauss festival organized by Hugo Goerlitz. The Amsterdam Symphony Orchestra, a remarkable aggregation of artists, played. His Parisian experiences were most gratifying; he appeared in the dual rôles of conductor-composer, his wife singing his lieder with exquisite taste.

As a conductor he ranks among the great ones. He is particularly sympathetic in his readings of modern works, though any one who has heard him direct a Mozart opera can never forget the impressions gleaned—the blitheness, sanity, sweetness. He is cool, never eccentric in his beat, and does not play upon his own personality, as do some other conductors.

A little critical and polemical literature has grown up about the Strauss case. In addition to the analytical programmes, some of them too fantastic to be of value, Hans Merian has written an extended study of Also sprach Zarathustra; Gustav Brecher, Richard Strauss; Dr. Erich Urban, Strauss contra Wagner—in which Wagner is proved to be old-fashioned; Urban has also put forth a pamphlet-essay, Richard Strauss. In his youth, writes Urban, Wagner cried exultantly, “I am a musician;” in his age he mumbled, “I am a poet.” And he really believed he had discovered in the Greek an excuse for his mutilation of drama and music. Then Urban turns to Liszt. Liszt, he said, went far, but not far enough. He grew timid when he saw the logical outcome of his experiments. He still clung to the classic, to the formal. Strauss appears. Urban thinks he showed absolutely no individual talent until his opus 14, Wanderer’s Sturmlied. His early work is Schumann, and Schumann at his worst. The learned critic does not believe that either von Bülow or Ritter counted in the formation of Strauss. He looks upon Guntram as an accident, and Heldenleben as an answer to Zarathustra. He does not believe the latter to have been inspired by Nietzsche,—Strauss composed it when he discovered that Nietzsche’s philosophy coincided with his own revolutionary programme. And as the same ideas are expressed in Heldenleben, the titles could be exchanged without any harm. Truly a Daniel come to judgment! It is in Heldenleben that Urban sees Strauss at the top notch of his ideals. Here is musical drama without the words, scenery, stage, or singers.

Brecher assigns only six periods to the development of his hero. Brahms has much to say in the early Strauss music. The critic outlines the orchestra before Strauss came: Haydn was the first real instrumental writer, one who dispensed with the vocal character; Mozart lent the orchestra freedom and beauty; Beethoven endowed it with individuality; Berlioz was all color; Liszt, patterning after Berlioz, developed thematic variety; and Wagner employed both the color of Berlioz and Liszt’s theme-weaving for his profounder and more poetically dramatic music. Strauss followed all these men, but returned to pure instrumental forms, avoiding in his later poems the stringent outlines of the absolute scheme, and being more eloquent than his predecessors. Macbeth and Don Juan belong, says Brecher, to the third period of Strauss. Death and Apotheosis is a reactionary period, as is Guntram—too much Liszt and Wagner, too much chromaticism. From opus 27 to 34 is the fifth period, nearly all songs, wonderful songs. Till Eulenspiegel belongs to this arbitrary grouping, and it closes with Also sprach Zarathustra. The sixth period opens with Don Quixote and Heldenleben. Beauty is routed by truth. Even Urban thinks Don Quixote is a colossal joke, written to astound the Philistines.

But these writers are in sympathy with the composer. The terrible Hanslick of Vienna is not. He, even at the expense of contradicting himself, praised Wagner’s melodic gifts as an offset to the more meagre thematic invention of Strauss. His criticism of Also sprach Zarathustra is not criticism—it is scarification. He heard the work in Vienna, on a programme in which figured Weber’s Euryanthe overture, and the C minor symphony of Beethoven. The good doctor is a joy to read in these days when politeness has closed critical mouths. He first drags out the memory of Liszt and stamps on it—Liszt, who begged from literature his subjects for a symphony, and “making the alms pass as music.” Strauss goes to philosophy instead of to poetry. And then he slashes to the right and left of him. It is capital reading, if not convincing. The tone-poems of Richard Strauss are a musical refutation of Hanslick’s theories. There is no “content” in music, he declares; “the egg stands, anyhow,” retorts Columbus-Strauss!

The Strauss piano music is hardly inviting to any but the most devoted. Severe in outline, sombre in hue, it leans not to the sweet intimacies of Chopin or Schumann. Opus 5 is a solo sonata in B minor, some thirty pages long. I prefer Tschaïkowsky’s effort in the same form. If it is not as klaviermässig, it is more mellow. Stern, and in the mood Doric, the several movements of the Strauss sonata are sinewy rather than plastic, though the adagio in E has some moving moments. The scherzo is light and bright in execution. The composition will never become popular. In opus 3 there are some pieces of interest,—five in all,—and here Schumann’s influence is writ plain. Dense is the pattern, while the ideas are based on a poetic idea. Two numbers from opus 9, Stimmungsbilder, will please. They are a tender Träumerei and a delicate lyrical bit called An Einsamer Quelle. In the latter the harmonic changes recall Wagner. The most ambitious piano music is the burleske in D minor for piano and orchestra. This must have been written in 1885, though it bears no opus number. It is extremely difficult in the solo part, and not especially grateful. I can recall no one but Eugen d’Albert and Herr Backhaus as having played it—the latter at the London Strauss festival of 1903. Here Brahms is to the fore, the very opening bar of the piano being the theme of Brahms’s first D minor ballade. But how different the treatment! Bitter, rather airy, more sardonic than witty, this burleske demonstrates that the Teuton often unbends as sadly and stiffly as the Briton. Compare the piece with the incomparable jesting of Scarlatti’s burlesca, that joke which begins in G minor and ends in D minor! It is the eternal difference between the Italian and the German. Crabbed I call this burleske. The ’cello and piano sonata in F is a capital composition, and so is the sonata in E flat for viola and piano. His concerto for violin and orchestra in D minor has never received the attention it deserves; and I wish for the sake of novelty that the beautiful horn concerto, opus 11, would be given. For the waldhorn Strauss has a natural sympathy.

The lieder literature is important in quality. He has written nearly a hundred songs, some of them priceless in idea and workmanship. It is in this form that his friends and enemies have agreed upon his melodic invention. This refers to the various collections numbered opus 10, 15, 17, 19, 21, 26, 27, 29, 32, and 34; but I wonder whether the later collections in opus 39 and opus 41, 43, and 44 are received with the same enthusiasm. Some of them are harmonically difficult to grasp, and many are deceptive; when Strauss seems at his simplest, he is often most irritatingly complex and recondite. But an overflowing meed of praise must be awarded the opus 15, the lovely serenade in F sharp from opus 17, several from opus 21 and 27, and all of opus 29. A critic considers O wärst du mein, from opus 26, number 2, and Sehnsucht, opus 32, as the most beautiful of all. No mood seems denied Strauss. His exposition of the most exotic is indicative of a subtle, rather than a sensuous, musical nature. Yet how simply and naturally he has indicated a primitive emotion in Jungenhexenlied, opus 39, number 2. The song is a masterpiece. The sturdy power, the sheer muscularity, of The Workman from the same set, should make it beloved of manly male singers. Its great, resounding blows in F minor stir one’s very soul. And its sentiment is that of healthy anarchy, as befits the text of the poet Richard Dehmel. Death the Releaser, Leises Lied, and To my Son complete this opus. The last has a noble ring. The Silent Longing is the capture of an exquisitely evanescent mood. There are five numbers in opus 41,—a Cradle Song; In der Campagna; On the Shore,—full of introspective beauty, a dashing, vagabondish song; Brother Good-for-nothing; and Whisp’ring Songs. In all the music seeks the emotional curve, in all is there absolute fidelity to the poetic theme—that is, fidelity as the composer conceives it. Of mere sensuous or decorative music-making there is none. Strauss is ever beset by the idea; whether dramatic, metaphysical, or romantic-lyric, the idea takes precedence of the sound that clothes it. So there is little pretence of form, little thought of vocal exigencies, while the piano accompaniments are the most difficult ever written. If he hammers out epics in his orchestral compositions, in his lyrics he is the patient, curious master of miniature, the ivory worker of shapes exotic.

Guntram, for which Strauss wrote his own book, the first opera of this composer, is not familiar to Americans. It was never a great success, despite its earnestness and indisputable depth. Modelled on Wagnerian lines, it has for a subject the doings of The Fighters for Love, an order of knights, which, Parsifal-like, in the middle of the thirteenth century wars for the Cross and Brotherly Love; but with song and not with sword. Guntram, the hero, is a Fighter for Love, and his adventures and passion for Freihild form the basis of the book. The preludes to Acts I and II have been played in this country. The first is a lovely scheme of orchestration, Wagnerian in texture, and celebrates the yearning desire which the singers have consecrated to art and to the Cross. The second prelude is a brilliant, joyous picture of a Festival of Victory. The form and development are absolutely free. It is interesting to note, on the last page of the first prelude, an essential-turn that comes straight from Götterdämmerung. Strauss employs it with skill as a pregnant motive. While it is too short for concert performance, the prelude of the last act is the embodiment of yearning and rich in harmonic life. The great duo of Guntram and Freihild and Guntram’s farewell are noble specimens of dramatic writing. Nevertheless the work lacks big wings.

Two later compositions of Strauss, bearing the opus number 42, are for Männerchor,—Liebe and Altdeutsches Schlachtlied, both after Herder. Two sixteen-voiced mixed choruses a capella are also announced. Enoch Arden, opus 38, is a melodrama for piano and recitative. It is an interesting experiment, being melodious and effective. Written for von Possart the German tragedian, the weight of the work falls upon the reader.

At the seventy-seventh Netherrhenish Music Festival in Aix-la-Chapelle, June, 1900, Strauss produced two Grössere Gesänge, opus 44, for low voice and orchestra. Decidedly here the bust is in the orchestra, the pedestal—! The Rückert and Richard Dehmel are the poets levied upon—the first represented by his Nächtlichtergang, the other by a Notturno.

Strauss occasionally indulges in flashes of sly humor. Here is a footnote he appends to his song opus 31, number 2, Wenn:—

Should any singers think of singing this song, while the nineteenth century is still in existence, the composer would advise them to transpose it from this point, a half-tone lower (i.e. into E flat), so that the composition may thus end in the key in which it began.

Fuersnot, a Singgedicht in one act, book by Ernst von Wolzogen, music by Richard Strauss, was produced at the Royal Opera House, Dresden, November 21, 1901. The libretto is founded on a Netherland story, entitled, The Fire Famine at Oudenaerde. Emil Paur introduced several excerpts, sonorous, brilliant music, at a Philharmonic concert.

When questioned about his future plans Strauss replied: “I have made a musical setting to Uhland’s Taillefer for chorus, soli, and full orchestra. I am surprised that musicians have not availed themselves of this fresh, magnificent poem before—at least I have heard of no setting. Altogether one admires Uhland too little these days. When I was younger I neglected reading him very much; but now I find one beauty after another in his writing. I also have material for two symphonic poems, but don’t know which one I shall use—if indeed I finish any—now. It usually takes two years before a composition begins to assume form with me. At first there comes to me an idea—a theme. This rests with me for months; I think of other things and busy myself with everything but it; but the idea is fermenting of its own accord. Sometimes I bring it to mind, or play the theme on the piano, just to see how far it has progressed—and finally it is ready for use. You see, therein lies the real art of creation—to know exactly when an idea is ripe, when one can use, must use it. More and more I cling to the belief that we conscious people have no control over our creative power. For instance, I slave over a melody and encounter an obstacle which I cannot surmount, however I try. This during the course of an evening; but the next morning the difficulty has surrendered itself, just as though my creative forces had toiled at it over night. Several years ago I told a friend that I meant to compose a symphonic poem, Spring. He repeated my remark, and at the making up of the next music festival programme my Spring was placed and I was asked to conduct it! The work is not even composed yet, despite the great number of themes and sketches I have for it. In fact, I don’t know when I will compose it—if at all. Sometimes a theme occurs first to me, and I find the poetic mate to it later; but at others the poetic idea begins to take on musical form. I may even compose an opera soon. A young Vienna poet has suggested a libretto which appeals to me very much. A libretto of my own is also receiving some consideration from me.

“The old metre of poetry, the iambic and trochiac rhythms—also the rhyme—are useless in music, because the latter has an entirely different rhythm, and this must necessarily destroy that of poetry when the two are joined. According to my opinion, the most available forms are the Nibelungen verses or a free prose. Why cannot music express philosophy? Metaphysics and music are sisters. Even in music one can express a view point, and if one wishes to approach the World Riddle, perhaps it can be done with the aid of music. Is not the third act of Tristan transcendental philosophy purely? Lastly, my next tone-poem will illustrate ‘a day in my family life.’ It will be partly lyrical, partly humorous—a triple fugue, the three subjects representing papa, mamma, and the baby!” This latter is the Sinfonia Domestica of which the first performance anywhere, was announced for March 9, 1904, at Carnegie Hall, New York City.

Jean Marnold, the acute critic of the Mercure de France, calls attention to the “melody of Strauss, which is frankly diatonic, the tonal character definitely determined.” This statement will be challenged by those who take the composer’s middle period as a criterion of his chromatic tendencies. But examine the later themes, and we are forced to agree with M. Marnold. Arthur Symons finds that Strauss is cerebral. He writes: “Strauss is what the French call un cérébral, which is by no means the same thing as a man of intellect. Un cérébral is a man who feels through his brain, in whom emotion transforms itself into idea, rather than in whom idea is transfigured by emotion. Strauss has written a Don Juan without sensuality, and it is in his lack of sensuality that I find the reason of his appeal. All modern music is full of sensuality, since Wagner first set the fevers of the flesh to music. In the music of Strauss the Germans have discovered the fever of the soul. And that is indeed what Strauss has tried to interpret.” W. J. Henderson is open to conviction. He wrote:—

“It is too soon for us to say that Strauss will influence the future. He may leave us nothing but certain purely mechanical improvements in orchestral technics. Even these will have their value. Yet all recent attempts at progress in music have been in the direction of more definite expression, and Strauss may be only a stepping-stone in an advance toward that blissful epoch whose hearers will display as much imagination as its composers, that transcendent condition in which genius understands genius.”

Edward E. Ziegler discerns that Richard Strauss is “a master of music mathematics and one who is composing music for the present. It is an easy evasion,” he adds, “to shift the responsibility for what the living generation cannot easily or will not willingly grasp and to proclaim that such intricate writing is for the future. But music has ever reflected life, and no other composer has so nearly approached a musical expression of our time as has Strauss. The febrile unrest, the neurotic striving of the hour, all have their musical equivalent in his greater compositions. Plying the stress of emphasis as Strauss does is characteristic of the present as is typical his use of the enormous orchestra. All life has become agitated by the exaggeration of the hour. It needed but a master like Strauss to express this truth in music.”

August Spanuth holds that “Richard Strauss may be a monstrous phenomenon, yet he embodies the domineering spirit of modern music. For more than two centuries composers have endeavored to vindicate the cause of programme-music, which the staunch old champions of ‘absolute music’ have fought from the outset. However, after the efforts of Berlioz and Liszt, Richard Strauss has succeeded in reversing the question, making it read thus: Is there a future left for instrumental music outside of the descriptive, pictorial, illustrative, suggestive, and philosophizing music of to-day?”

Ernest Newman, in a masterly article, concludes with this telling passage:—

... This kind of music adds to our knowledge of man and the world as much as does a play of Ibsen or a novel of Tolstoy. Certainly to any one who knows Strauss’s music to Don Quixote, the story of Cervantes is henceforth inconceivable without it; the story itself, indeed, has not one tithe of the humor and the profound sadness which is infused into it by Strauss. What he has done in this work is to inaugurate the period of the novel in music. And here at last we see the subtle fitness of things that has deprived Strauss of those purely lyrical qualities, whose absence, as I have previously argued, makes it impossible for him to be an absolute creator of shapes of pure self-sustained beauty. His type of melody is now seen to be, not a failing, but a magnificent gift. It is the prose of music—a grave, flexible, eloquent prose. His style is nervous, compact, sinuous, as good prose should be, which, as it is related, through its subject-matter, more responsibly to life than is poetry, must relinquish some of the fine abandonment of song, and find its compensation in a perfect blend, a perfect compromise of logic and rapture, truth and ideality. “I can conceive,” says Flaubert, in one of his letters, “a style which should be beautiful; which some one will write one of these days, in ten years or in ten centuries; which shall be rhythmical as verse, precise as the language of science, and with undulations, modulations as of a violoncello, flashes of fire; a style which would enter into the idea like the stroke of a stiletto; a style on which our thoughts would sail over gleaming surfaces, as it were, in a boat with a good wind aft.”

No better description, it seems to me, could be had of the musical style of Strauss, with its constant adaptation to the emotional and intellectual atmosphere of the moment, and its appropriateness to the realistic description of character and milieu which is his mission in music. His qualities are homogeneous; he is not a Wagner manqué nor an illegitimate son of Liszt, but the creator of a new order of things in music, the founder of a new type of art. The only test of a literature being alive is, as Dr. Georg Brandes says, whether it gives rise to new problems, new questionings. Judged by this test, the art of Strauss is the one sign of new and independent life in music since Wagner; for it perpetually spurs us on to the discussion of fresh problems of æsthetics, of psychology, and of form.

V

Richard Strauss is the most intellectual of musicians. Saint-Saëns pointed out long ago the master part harmony would play in the music of the future, and Strauss realized the theory that melody is no longer sovereign in the kingdom of tone; his master works are architectural marvels. In structure, in rhythmical complexity, in striking harmonies, ugly, bold, brilliant, dissonantal, his symphonic poems are without parallel. Berlioz never dared, Liszt never invented, such miracles of polyphony, a polyphony beside which Wagner’s is child’s play and Bach’s is outrivalled. And this learning, this titanic brushwork on vast and sombre canvases, are never for formal music’s sake; indeed, one may ask if it is really music, and not a new art. It is always intended to mean something, say something, paint some one’s soul; it is an attempt to make the old absolute music new and articulate. This flies in the face of Schopenhauer, who declared music to be a presentative, not a representative, art. In his gallery of psychological portraiture Strauss becomes a sort of musical Dostoïevsky. He divines, Maeterlinck-like, the secret tragedy of existence, and paints with delicacy, with great barbaric masses, in colors that glow, poetic and legendary figures which yield up their souls to the psychological genius who questions them. I call the tendency of Strauss décadent, like Wagner’s; both men build up their pictures by a multitude of infinitesimal touches; both men decompose their themes,—and this is the highest art of the decadence. Unity is sometimes absent, and also the power that makes for righteousness, which we find in Beethoven’s music.

Touching on the moral of this new dispensation in art, I may confess that I am puzzled by its absolute departure from the ethic of Christianity. It is not precisely a pagan code that Strauss presents in his splendid laconic manner; rather is it the ethic of Spinoza ravished by the rhetoric of Nietzsche. Affirmation of the will, not its denial, is both preached and practised by this terrible composer. For him the ineluctable barrier of barriers is the return to simplicity, the return to the people. He may be simple in his complex way, and he may sympathize lyrically with the proletarian; yet he is the aristocrat of aristocrats in art; and his art, specialized, nervous, and alembicated, may be the call to arms of lonely, proud souls that refuse to go to the people as did Tolstoy. With Ibsen’s Brand, not Tolstoy’s, Levin is Strauss in closer communion. And he may hold the twentieth century in his hand.

During his Italian trip Strauss wrote Aus Italien, opus 16, a symphonic fantasia that has been heard in America with delight. It is fresh, vigorous, even somewhat popular, in themes, and characteristically colored. The orchestration was the envy of the younger men. Italia was first given in Munich in 1887 under Strauss. His violin sonata, opus 18, was composed the same year. Then followed fast the series of daring orchestral frescos that placed the name of Strauss at the very forefront of living composers. And yet how un-German his music seems, hatched though it be from the very nest of the classics! Strauss is not of the same blood as the Vienna dance composers. He has written a valse; but who could compare the light, voluptuous Danube music to the ecstatic scarlet dance of the Overman in Also sprach Zarathustra! Despite the fact that it is preceded only by Italia, Macbeth, and Don Juan, Tod und Verklärung gives us in esse all the overpowering qualities of Strauss, chiefest of them being imagination without the ugliness detected by sensitive natures in later compositions. Death and Apotheosis is a masterpiece. The nineteenth century, notwithstanding its devotion to the material, produced poets and prose masters for whom death had a peculiar predilection. There is the mystic Maeterlinck, with his sobbing shadowgraphs of Death the Intruder; Tolstoy, with his poignant picture of the Death of Iván Illyitch; Arnold Böcklin, that Swiss master, who sang on elegiac canvas his Toten Insel; and have we not all read Walt Whitman in his matchless threnody “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed”? It is not strange, then, that Strauss, a lyric philosopher of the same passionate pattern as Friedrich Nietzsche, should wrestle with a problem as old as eternity. He does wrestle with it in his symphonic poem—attacking it in large symbolism, free from the morbidities of the decadent poets; accomplishes it in a way that wrings the very heartstrings.

It is the spectacle of a sick man in “a necessitous little chamber” reviewing his struggles and defeats as the fever cracks his veins and throttles his life. He has failed as failed Balzac’s Louis Lambert, as fail all men with lofty ideals. He has reached that “squat tower” of defeat, death, which Robert Browning chanted in Childe Roland. To the dark tower he goes, and dauntless at the last, he sets the slughorn to his lips and blows victory in the very teeth of Death. Perhaps this most modern of poems gives the key to the Strauss music better than any other in the English tongue. The dying man sunken in lethargic slumber, his heart feebly beating in syncopated rhythms, recalls his childhood, his lusty youth, his mad passion for life at its thickest. He toils and reaches summits only to hear the implacable Halt! of destiny. Yet he continues to combat Fate, but to be laid low. And dying, he triumphs; for his ideal lifts him to the heights, to “Sun-Smitten Sunium.” He has dared, and daring conquers. The fable is old—as old as the Prometheus myth. In music we have it incarnated in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the tonality of which—C minor, C major—Strauss has adopted. Liszt, too, in his Tasso, a symphonic setting of Goethe’s tragedy, attempted the same task, and accomplished it in a brilliant, spectacular fashion. The thematic grouping of the Strauss poem is simplicity itself when compared to the towering architectonics of A Hero’s Life and Thus spake Zarathustra. After a lengthy prologue in which mood, atmosphere, Stimmung in a word, and echoes of childish babbling are subtly contrived, the bolt of destruction is let loose, and fever, a spectre, courses through the allegro. The Ideal motive sounds but in gasping, broken accents. It is only after the delirium has reached its climax that a period of repose, an analogy of the lyric period, is attained. The childhood of the man is lisped naïvely; youth and its frolicking unconsciousness are aptly portrayed; manly passion and conflict end the section, for the ominous Halt! is blared out by the trombones. The development—as in all developments of this composer—contains miracles of counterpoint buried in passages of emotional splendor. With cumulative power and pathos we hear a climax of imposing sonorities; the marchlike motive of the Ideal is given in all its majesty, and in a C major of rainbow riches the poem finishes. Strauss has never surpassed the plangency of coloring, the melting sweetness of this score. He is more philosophic in Also sprach Zarathustra, more dramatic in Don Juan, more heroic in Ein Heldenleben; but never has his message been so consoling, never has he set so vividly over his orchestra the arc of promise. That such music came forth from his potent youth is a prophecy of an astounding future. He is the only living issue in music to-day; no other master has his stride, his stature.

That merry old rogue’s tune, Till Eulenspiegel, is a scherzo-like rondo picturing the crazy pranks of the historic Tyll Owlglass. Its grotesque, passionate melancholy, tender violence, its streaks of broad humor interrupted by mocking pathos, its galloping down a narrow avenue, at the end of which looms the gibbet, its mockery of custom, flaunting of the Philistine, and the unrepentant death of Till,—make it a picture unparalleled in music literature. Scored brilliantly, the rondo leaves in its trail a whiff of sulphur and violets. It is fantastic music, fantastically conceived, fantastically executed.

The score of Also sprach Zarathustra is dated “Begun February 4; finished August 24, 1896. Munich.” The composer’s words in this connection must be given:—

“I did not intend to write philosophical music or portray Nietzsche’s great work musically. I meant to convey musically an idea of the development of the human race from its origin, through the various phases of development, religious as well as scientific, up to Nietzsche’s idea of the Uebermensch.”

Only a musical epitome of the creative processes of the cosmos! The modesty of Strauss is of a Michelangelo-like magnitude. This new Faust of music, Nietzsche-Strauss, who would assail the very stars in their courses, has written some pages in this opus that are of imposing grandeur. There is an uplifting roar at the opening, an effect of sunrise—purely imaginary all these musical pictures, yet none the less startling and credible—as Zarathustra’s trumpets solemnly intone his motive. These tremendous chords in their naked simplicity alone proclaim Strauss a man of genius and give him fee simple to the symphonic heritage of Beethoven and Brahms. The A flat section is notably melodious and luscious in color. The five-voiced fugue is ugly yet masterful, and the dance music furious in its abandonment, corybantic in its revelry. Such laughter has never been heard in an orchestra. The melodic curve is passional. Strauss is here tender, dramatic, bizarre, poetic, humorous, ironic, witty, wicked—simple never. The noble art of simplicity he lacks. This is the vastest and most difficult score ever penned. It is a cathedral in tone, sublime and fantastic, with its grotesque gargoyles, hideous flying abutments, exquisite traceries, prodigious arches, half gothic, half infernal, huge and resounding spaces, gorgeous façades, and heaven-splitting spires,—a mighty musical structure! We go to the rear-world, are in religious transports, are swept on the passional curves of that fascinating C minor theme “of Joys and Passions” and repelled by the fugal aspect of Science. There is “holy laughter” and dancing; the dancing of the midget, man, in the futile, furtive gleam of sunshine that bridges the Past and the Future with the Present. Then those twelve bell strokes—“deep eternity” is heard in the humming of the metal, and the close is of enigmatic tonality. Nothing as audacious was ever penned by the hand of man—in music.

The Nature theme is ingeniously designed. It is, in the most natural of tonalities, C major, and consists of C, the fifth, and the octave above it. The third is missing out of the chord, and this makes the “tonal sex” of the chord variable. It is, says Merian, hermaphroditic, as is Nature itself. Major and minor are not yet divided. And the missing third makes this theme one of the World Riddle: “It is the sphinx Nature, who is staring at us with empty, lustreless eyes, inviting confidence, yet awesome.”

In the midst of the dancing orgy of joy sounds the bell of midnight. This is the final division, The Song of the Night Wanderer. Nietzsche, in the later editions of his book, gave this chapter the heading, The Drunken Song; and on the heavy strokes of Brummglocke he wrote:—

But Strauss chooses this symbol as the time when Zarathustra begins his journey into eternity. The hour of midnight is the hour of death, the goal of Zarathustra’s career. This episode is an emotional parallel to the period when Zarathustra is felled to earth with conflicting longings. And the Theme of Disgust here stands forth as the Motif of Death, controlling the scene. Zarathustra’s earthly death is wonderfully translated into tone. The Theme of Death struggles with that of earthly strife, and both succumb in a broken chord of C major. Then without any modulation the Theme of the Ideal sounds in B major and the transfiguration is achieved. Again there is a faint reminiscent plea of the conquered themes. The Theme of the Ideal sways aloft in the higher regions in B major; the trombones insist on the cryptic unresolved chord of C-E-F sharp; and in the double basses and celli is repeated C-G-C—the World Riddle. Emil Paur, ever an ardent Strauss pioneer, produced Also sprach Zarathustra in New York, December, 1897.

In W. B. Yeats’s Ideas of Good and Evil, there appears this characteristic passage: “Have not poetry and music arisen, as it seems, out of the sounds the enchanters made to help their imagination to enchant, to charm, to bind with a spell themselves and the passers-by? These very words, a chief part of all praises of music or poetry, still cry to us their origin.” The Irish mystic poet is writing of magic, and I cannot help applying his words to Richard Strauss, who is the initiator of new art. After hearing his Till Eulenspiegel conducted by the composer, I was more than ever impressed by the idea that Strauss is diverting music into psychologic channels, moulding its plastic forms into shapes that are really vital, so intense is their personal appeal. Since primitive man howled his lays to the moon, the art of music has become in every age more and more definitive; even the classic masters were not content to play alone with tonal arabesques, but sought to impress upon their bars a definite mood. In Beethoven the passion for articulating his meanings literally re-created music. When Wagner found that he had nothing new to say, he resorted to an old device—he wedded his music to words. Richard Strauss has now taken up the chain, the last links of which were so patiently forged by Franz Liszt. He has at his command all the old enchantments of music; he can woo and ravish the ear and command the tempests; but this is not enough. He would have his message still more articulate. He is a thinker, a philosopher as well as a poet, and deeply religious in the cosmical sense; he purposes no less a task than the complete subjugation of men’s imagination. Notes, phrases, groups, movements, masses of tone are no longer merely sensuous symbols, but the actual symbols of a language; we must hasten to learn the new speech, which relates in wonderful tones wonderful things. Tschaïkowsky aimed at this definiteness, but his passionate, emotional nature clouded the workings of his intellect. Strauss, too, has had the seven devils of sensuality in his mansion, but has exorcised them by sheer force of a great spiritual nature—the man is a spiritualist, a seer in the broader meanings of these much-worn terms. The vision of approaching death in his Don Quixote could have been conceived only by one for whom life and the universe itself were symbols, the living garment by which we apprehend the Deity.

In our shrewd categories of things intellectual and things emotional, we partition off too sharply brain and feeling, soul and body. Life is not a proposition by Euclid; nor is art. It is one of the functions of music to make us feel, another to make us think; the greatest masters are ever those who make us both feel and think in one vivid moment. This Beethoven has done, Wagner has done, and now Richard Strauss. You cannot call his music frigidly intellectual, as is often the music of Brahms, nor does it relapse into such debauches of frenetic passion as Tschaïkowsky’s—the imperial intellect of Strauss controls his temperament. He is, like Nietzsche, a lyric philosopher, but never, like Nietzsche, will he allow the problems of life and art to overthrow his reason. In the thunders of his scores, I seem to hear the annunciation of a new dispensation, of a new evangel of art which shall preach the beauty of the soul and the beauty of body; life on the other side of good and evil.

There are many to whom Richard Strauss’s tone-poem Ein Heldenleben proved musically baneful. Yet Strauss wears no mask. His own musical lineaments, convulsed in passion’s grimace, exultant with grandiose dreams, or distorted by deadly rage, are the naked expression of his fantastic soul. And to the orthodox his contempt for clear tonalities, his mockery of the very harmonic foundations of the art, his juggling with bizarre rhythms—in a word, his avoidance of the normal, the facile, the smug, and the unoriginal, is as great a crime against ethics as the lucidly insane proclamations of the Master Immoralist, Friedrich Nietzsche. Repeated hearings convince one regarding Strauss’s sincerity. He is working out his own artistic salvation on his own premeditated lines. He is the solitary soul of Hauptmann, and he is doomed to mockery until he is understood.

It is impossible to escape the compelling magnetism of the man from Munich. He is still young, still in his storm and stress period. When the time for clarification comes, Strauss in this final analysis will emerge a very big man. His Hero’s Life has its ugly spots—critics and criticism are objectified in a cruelly sardonic fashion—and that battlefield will remain for this generation either sheer brutal noise or else the forefront of the higher æstheticism in music. One way or the other it matters little; the reputation of Strauss will not stand or fall by this poem. The main thing to record is the overwhelming impression of power, anarchistic if you will, that informs Ein Heldenleben. And all the more disquieting is the discovery that this Wizard of Dreams wears no antique musical mask—his own is tragic and significant enough.

And let it be said that for conventional programme music Strauss has ever manifested a violent aversion. The only clew he gives to his work is the title. Some commentators do the most mischief, for they read into this music every imaginable meaning. It is then as absolute music that Ein Heldenleben may be criticised, though the names of the various subdivisions give the hearer, if not a key, at least notion of the emotional trend of this composition. This is the way Richard Strauss has outlined the scheme of his E flat Symphony, opus 40, his Eroica:—

I. The Hero. II. The Hero’s Antagonists. III. The Hero’s Consort. IV. The Hero’s Battlefield. V. The Hero’s Work of Peace. VI. The Hero’s Retirement from Worldly Life and Strife and Ultimate Perfection. It must be remembered that this is a purely arbitrary arrangement, for in the formal sense the ground plan of the symphony would be thus: The first three sections contain the thematic statements; the next two—parts four and five—are devoted to the exposition or free fantasia; the last is a highly elaborate summing up or coda. Here is the symphonic form in an attenuated shape, the chief novelty being the introduction in part five—or second division of the working-out section of new thematic material, modest quotations from the Strauss earlier symphonic works. There can then be no doubt as to the identity of the protagonist of this drama-symphony—it is the glorified image of Richard Strauss. This latter exploitation of personality need not distress us unnecessarily; Strauss but follows in the footsteps of Walt Whitman and of his own contemporaries—Rodin, the sculptor; Gabriel d’Annunzio, in Il Fuoco; Nietzsche, in Zarathustra; Tolstoy, in all his confessions—despite their inverted humility; Wagner, in Meistersinger; Franz Stuck, the Munich painter, whose portrait of his own eccentric self is not the least of his work. Strauss might appreciatively quote Walt Whitman: “Am I of mighty Manhattan the son?” as a justification of what paradoxically could be called his objective egotism. But the composer not only deifies the normal man, he shadows forth Nietzsche’s supernormal humanity. He is a very Victor Hugo in his colossal egotism, yet he names it the ego of mankind. So avoiding all this pother of philosophy and æsthetics, one is forced to return to the music as poetic music.

The Hero theme is Beethovian in its diatonic majesty—the entire section has a Beethoven color, despite its dissonantal interruptions—while the second section, an amiable picture of the composer’s adversaries, suggests in a triturated manner the irony, caricature, and burlesque spirit of Till Eulenspiegel. His critical adversaries are represented as a snarling, sorry crew, with acrid and acrimonious souls, duly set forth by the woodwind instruments, chiefly the oboe; there is also a horrid sounding phrase, empty fifths for tenor and bass tuba. Then the hero’s wife is pictured by the solo violin. It is very feminine. It mounts in passion and interest with the duologue. After that—chaos! It is but the developing of the foregoing motives. And such an exposition, it is safe to say, has never been heard since saurians roared in the steaming marshes of the young planet, or when prehistoric man met in multitudinous and shrieking combat. Yet the web is polyphonically spun—spun magnificently. This battle scene is full of unmitigated horror. One knows that it is the free fantasia, but such a one has never been conceived before by the mind of man. A battle is not a peaceful or a pleasant place, especially a modern battlefield. You can dimly, after several hearings, thread the thematic mazes, but so discordant are the opposing tonalities, so screaming the harmonies, and so highly pitched the dynamic scheme, that the normal ear, thus rudely assaulted, becomes bewildered and finally insensitive. Strauss has not a normal ear. His is the most marvelous agglomeration of cortical cells that science has ever recorded. So acute are his powers of acoustical differentiation that he must hear, not alone tones beyond the base and the top of the normal scale unheard of by ordinary humans, but he must also hear, or, rather, overhear, the vibratory waves from all individual sounds. His music gives us the impression of new overtones, of scales that violate the well tempered, of tonalities that approximate to the quarter-tones of Oriental music. And yet there is, besides the barbaric energy displayed, grandeur in the conception of this extraordinary battle piece. It evokes the picture of countless and waging hosts; of forests of waving spears and clashing blades. The din, heat, and turmoil of conflict are spread over all and the ground piled high with the slain.

It is all too intricate to grasp at several hearings, though it may become child’s play for the next generation. Richard Wagner’s case must not be forgotten at this point. So complex is the counterpoint of Strauss that one of his commentators recommends the all but impossible feat of listening to it horizontally and vertically. In the fifth part we hear themes from the composer’s Don Juan, Macbeth, Death and Apotheosis, Till Eulenspiegel, Zarathustra, Don Quixote, Guntram, and his lovely song, Traum durch die Dämmerung. With the coda, after some sinister retrospection of an agitated life, comes peace, pastoral, soul-renewing. And the big E flat chord that closes the volume is worth the entire composition. It is the most magnificent and imposing rainbow of tone that ever spanned the harmonic heavens. Not Wagner’s wonderful C major chord, which begins the Meistersinger overture, is comparable to the iridescence of this Uebermensch’s sonorous valedictory. Strauss has not hesitated to annex some themes from Parsifal and Tristan; there is, indeed, much Wagner in the score. But do not call this man a madman, a décadent—unless by décadent you mean the expression in its literary sense as in an undue devotion to the letter at the expense of the word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, page, chapter, and book. He has great energy, great power of concentration; and his critics—those he so caustically portrays as snarling and cynical in his very Till-Eulenspiegel-like second section—those critics, we repeat, must admit the man’s skill in scoring, in contrapuntal mastery. Whether all this monumental labor is worth the trouble; whether the very noticeable disproportion—spiritual and physical—between the themes and their handling; whether these things are to defy established canonic conventions and live by virtue of their characteristic truth and tonal beauty,—are considerations I gratefully relinquish to the next generation. Naturally there is repellent music in the score; but then the neo-realists insist on truth, not on the pursuit of vague and decorative beauty. It is the characteristic versus the ornamental; and who shall dare predict its future success or extinction? One thing must be insisted upon—the absolute abandonment of the old musical ideal, else Strauss and his tendencies go by the board. The well-sounding, the poetic,—in the romantic sense,—are thrown to the winds in this monstrous orgy; an organized orgy in the Balzac meaning of the phrase—for Strauss is only mad north-northwest, and can always tell a harmonic hawk from a hernshaw. In his most delirious moments he remembers his orchestral palette. And what a gorgeous, horrible color scheme is his! He has a taste for sour progressions, and every voice in his orchestral family is forced to sing impossible and wicked things. He owes much to Beethoven, Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner,—the Wagner of Tristan and Parsifal,—and often he compasses both beauty and grandeur.

The Strauss tone-poems are dramas without words. What Tschaïkowsky so eloquently executed as single figures in the character studies of Romeo and Juliet, Francesca da Rimini, Hamlet, and Manfred, Richard Strauss expands to the compass of a psychical tonal drama, dispensing with words, with actions, with the machinery of the stage, just as the great masters of fiction supplanted the makers of epics and their supernatural furniture by a synthesis in which action, dialogue, description, comment, are melted into homogeneous narrative. Every instrument in the Strauss orchestra is an actor that speaks its lines solo or during an amazing polyphony. After Don Quixote one need not be told that Strauss is not a mere Tintoretto of the orchestra; he is, I am not loath to repeat, both painter and psychologist. As the greatest narrator in modern prose is Gustave Flaubert, so Richard Strauss is the greatest of musical narrators. There is no longer any question of form in the classic sense; every music symbol and device hitherto known in the art of music is utilized and reënforced by the invention of numberless methods for driving home to the imagination the Old-World tale of Don Quixote and his squire. It may be objected here that the story of Cervantes should suffice without any of the sonorous exfoliations of this composer. Very true. But Strauss only uses Don Quixote as he uses Zarathustra or Don Juan, as a type of something that may be discovered in all humanity. Don Quixote the perfect dreamer may be the Knight of Cervantes or our next-door neighbor. More terrible still, he may be our true self masked by the dull garb of life’s quotidian struggle for bread! And to offset the fantasy of the knight we have the homely wisdom of Sancho Panza, who, having barked his shins as well as warmed them at the grate of life, always speaks by the card. A sensible fool, he is not understood by the foolish sensitivist, the poet who looks aloft and therefore misses the prizes beloved of most men.

Why is not this a theme fit for musical development? It has every element dear to the heart of the poetic composer—fantasy, poetry, broad, obvious humor, realism, nobility of idea, and an almost infinite number of surfaces fit for the loving brush of a master painter. Then there is the psychology. Don Quixote, half-mad, chivalric withal, must be depicted; as a counterfoil the obese humors of Sancho Panza are ready for celebration. After subjecting this pair to the minutest musical scrutiny, their voyages and adventures must be duly set forth. It is evident that here we are confronted by many difficulties. It is no longer a question of mere musicianship. Form is a thing of the grammarians, to be discussed behind closed doors by persons who believe in musty counterpoint and the rules of the game. A great vital imagination, defying alike gods and men and capable of shaping his dreams, a man of humor, malice, irony, above all else irony, tenderness, pity, and the marrow of life, love,—all these qualities, plus an infernal (or celestial if you like the word better) science, must the composer of a Don Quixote possess.

Strauss calls his work “Fantastic variations on a theme, of knightly character.” For the benefit of the musically pious let me add that it is in the form—broadly—of a Thema con Variazione and Finale. Therein Strauss may be said to mock his own idealism, as Heine and Nietzsche once mocked theirs. The realism is after all a realism of fantasy; for the narrative deals with what the Knight of the Rueful Countenance imagined and with what his trusty squire thought of him. With his characteristic flair for an apt subject, Strauss recognized in the semi-dream-life of Don Quixote a theme pat for treatment—and how he has treated it! That magnificent gift of irony, inherent in every sentence he utters, here expands in a soil worthy of it. A garden of curious and beautiful flowers—flowers of evil as well as good—blooms in this score. Its close contains some affecting and noble pages, as affecting as Tschaïkowsky’s, as dignified and dramatic as Richard Wagner’s. There is no interruption in the different sections. Don Quixote is “enacted” by the solo violoncello, the viola represents Sancho Panza. (Perhaps Strauss indulged in a sly witticism at the expense of the romantic Berlioz and his viola solo in Harold in Italy.) We first see—some hear, others see—Don Quixote reading crack-brained romances of chivalry. There are themes grandiose, mock heroic and crazy in their gallantry. Queer harmonies from time to time indicate the profound mental disturbance of the knight. He envisages the ideal woman; giants attack her; he rushes to the rescue. The muting of the instruments, tuba included, produces the idea of slow-creeping madness and a turbulent comminglement of ideas. Suddenly his reason goes, and with a crazy glissando on the harps and a mutilated version of the knightly theme the unfortunate man becomes quite mad. From music to madness is but a step after all. Don Quixote is now Knight Errant.

Then follows, after a new theme rich in characterization, the theme of Sancho Panza, for the bass clarinet and bass tuba; later always on the viola. The fat shoulders, big paunch, the mean, good-natured, lying, gluttonous, constant fellow are limned with the startling fidelity that Gustave Doré or Daniel Vièrge attained—for music can give the sense of motion; it is par excellence the art of narration.

The ten variations which ensue are masterpieces. We no longer ask for the normal eight-bar euphonious melody, for the equable distribution of harmonies, for order, rhythm, mass, and logic; but, with suspense unconcealed, follow the line of the story, amazed, delighted, perplexed, angered, piqued, interested—always interested by the magic of the narrator. The adventure with the windmills; the victorious battle against the host of the great emperor Alifanfaron; dialogues of Knight and Squire; the meeting with the Penitents and the Knight’s overthrow; his vigil; the encounter with his Dulcinea; the ride through the air; the journey in the enchanted boat; the conflict with the two magicians; the combat with the Knight of the Silver Moon; and the overthrow of Don Quixote and his death,—are so many canvases upon which are painted with subtle, broad, ironic, and naïve colors the memorable history heretofore hinted at. The realistic effects, notably the use of the wind machine in Variation VII, are not distasteful. Muted brass in Variation II suggests the plaintive m-a-a-h-s of a herd of sheep. The grunting of pigs, crowing of roosters, roaring of lions, and hissing of snakes were crudely imitated by the classic masters; while in the Wagner music-dramas may be discovered quite a zoölogical collection. Nor is the wind machine so formidable as it is said to be. It is an effect utilized to represent the imaginary flight through the air in a wild gale of Knight and Squire on a wooden Pegasus. We know that it is pure imagination, for the growling tremolo of the double basses on one note tells the listener that the solid earth has really never been abandoned.

Throughout, there are many ravishing touches of tenderness, of sincere romance; and the finale is very pathetic. His reason returns—wonderfully described—and the poor, lovable Knight, recognizing his aberration, passes gently away. Here Strauss utilizes a device as old as the hills, and one heard in the B minor symphony of Tschaïkowsky. It is sort of a basso ostinato, the tympani obstinately tapping a tone as the soul of the much-tried man takes flight. Perhaps the accents of a deep-seated pessimism may be overheard here—for I believe Richard Strauss too great a nature to remain content with his successes. He recalls to me in this poem the little mezzotint of John Martin, where Sadak in search of the waters of oblivion painfully creeps over the cruel edges of terrifying abysses to misty heights, upon which still more appalling dangers await the intrepid soul.

Strauss has only reached the midway of his mortal life. A stylist, a realist in his treatment of his orchestral hosts, a psychologist among psychologists, a master of a new and generous culture, a thinker, above all an interpreter of poetic and heroic types of humanity, who shall say to him: Dare no further! His audacity is only equalled by his mental serenity. In all the fury of his fantasy his intelligence is sovereign over its kingdom.