I
Two or three years ago Richard Strauss was practically unknown in this
country. A few people had heard works of his abroad; a few more had
bought his complex scores and worried through them as best they could,
mostly deriving from them only the impression that Strauss was getting
madder and madder every year. From other and happier climes, where the
demand for music is almost as great as the supply, there came weird
stories of this new art. One thing was universally admitted as being
beyond dispute--that Strauss was a master of orchestral effect such as
the world had never seen; but all the rest was pure legend. In 1897
_Also sprach Zarathustra_ was played at the Crystal Palace; old Sir
George Grove, in a private letter, expressed what was probably the
opinion of most of the people who sat it out: "What can have happened
to drag down music from the high level of beauty, interest, sense,
force, grace, coherence and any other good quality, which it rises to
in Beethoven and also (not so high) in Mendelssohn, down to the low
level of ugliness and want of interest that we had in Strauss's absurd
farrago ...? _Noise_ and _effect_ seems to be so much the aim now."
It was the old, old story. The man who listens to a new art and is
momentarily revolted by it never thinks that the deficiencies may be
not in the art but in himself; with sublime arrogance he disposes in
half-an-hour of a work that perhaps took a brain three times the weight
of his own half a decade to write. There was some excuse for Grove;
he was nearly eighty years old, and _Also sprach Zarathustra_ may
well have sounded to his venerable ears like chaos come again. Other
people had not the same excuse. In any case, an isolated performance
of so complex a work as this was hardly the way to educate the musical
masses up to the new evangel. The Strauss-flower languished decidedly
for some time after in England. It is true that one could occasionally
hear, either in London or in the provinces, _Till Eulenspiegel_, _Don
Juan_, _Tod und Verklärung_, and a song or two, but this was all. Now
and then there was a little wrangle in the press over the merits and
tendencies of Strauss. One courageous group of critics dared to say
that here was a composer likely to be the next big figure in musical
history after Wagner; another group, equally courageous, was steadily
occupied in laying up material for the laughter of future generations.
Some of these latter gentlemen had already firmly secured their place
in history by their opposition, two or three decades ago, to Wagner.
Now, with undiminished zeal and energy, anxious to achieve a plural
immortality, they industriously plied their mops against the oceanic
tide of Strauss. A third group followed the banner of the ingenious
gentleman who "hedged" by declaring that Strauss's music was still
_sub judice_--as if _all_ musicians were not continually _sub judice_.
But while it was very gratifying to behold this contest--all fighting
being a testimony to life--what was all the strife about? Merely, for
the most part over _Don Juan_, a comparatively early work of Strauss,
in no way representative of the possibilities of his methods or of the
stage of evolution at which he had even then arrived. The real Strauss
was to be seen not in _Don Juan_ but in _Don Quixote_, _Also sprach
Zarathustra_, and _Ein Heldenleben_. Yet the flower of the intelligence
of England was wrangling noisily over three works of the composer's
youth--_Till Eulenspiegel_, _Tod und Verklärung_, and _Don Juan_! It
was as if, in 1881, just before the production of _Parsifal_, the
English champions of the rival schools had been slaying each other over
the question as to whether Wagner had not gone a little too far in
_Tannhäuser_ and _Lohengrin_. Verily England was asleep.
Then Strauss himself came twice to the metropolis, first to conduct
some miscellaneous works, then to produce his latest tone-poem _Ein
Heldenleben_, for the first time in England. Now the interest, or at
any rate the curiosity, of London was stirred a little. An abstract,
disinterested passion for music itself, a cultivated desire for
new things as distinguished from the merely circus interest in new
performers, seems beyond the powers of all but a few souls in that vast
population. Organised discussion of a new composer only comes into
being when he himself happens to be in the city. As Sir Thomas Browne
has it, "Some believe the better for seeing Christs sepulchre; and
when they have seen the Red Sea, doubt not of the miracle." As it was,
it is questionable whether so large an audience would have flocked to
hear--or to see--Strauss on the _Heldenleben_ occasion, if that concert
had not also happened to be the first at which Mr. Henry Wood appeared
after a long illness. When, some six months later, a three days'
Strauss Festival was given at St. James's Hall, with the fine Amsterdam
orchestra that plays him so intelligently, and with Mengelberg and
Strauss himself as conductors, but this time without a convalescent Mr.
Wood, the general public showed disgracefully little interest in the
thing. However, the seed had been sown, and its growth has been fairly
rapid. We have not yet heard in England the latest work of Strauss--the
_Symphonia domestica_--and _Don Quixote_[59] has not been repeated
since it was given its solitary English performance at the Festival.
But _Ein Heldenleben_--the terrible _Ein Heldenleben_, the bugbear,
the bogey of a couple of years ago--has become astonishingly popular.
It is played quite frequently; young ladies barely out of their teens
study the score and discuss the love-music appreciatively. _Till
Eulenspiegel_, _Tod und Verklärung_, _Don Juan_,--these we hear so
often that one no longer gets a shock when one sees them on the bills;
even _Also sprach Zarathustra_ is occasionally given. _Aus Italien_
has had several performances, and the youthful Symphony in F minor
(op. 12) has been played once at least. The violin concerto, the violin
sonata, the 'cello sonata, and the piano quartet may all be heard
from time to time. So that at last the reproach of total ignorance of
Strauss is taken away from us, even if we do not hear so much of him,
especially of his very latest works, as we would like.
It is a pity we cannot get more performances of his bigger works,
for the amateur who does not hear him often on the orchestra, and
who tries to get a knowledge of him from the easier things that can
be played at home, is likely to get a very false impression of him.
He has passed through so many stages of artistic development that
we have only to pick up an early work of his here and there to be
capable of a dogmatism concerning him that is ludicrously wrong. I
can recall no example in musical history of a man with such native
strength and such pronounced individuality suggesting, in his youthful
works, so many other musicians of note who have gone before him. You
will find in the earlier Strauss abundant traces of Mozart, of Haydn,
of Beethoven, of Wagner, of Schumann, of Brahms, of Liszt. Yet the
curious thing is that nowhere do we feel that Strauss has been, even
for a little time, wholly under the influence of any one of these; he
is always himself, though he unaccountably lapses at times into the
most distinct reminiscences of the manner of other men. No one but
he could have penned the vigorous Piano Sonata (op. 5); in the first
movement, for example, not only the _mâle_ _tristesse_ of the mood,
but the firm and flexible handling is indubitably his. Yet in this
same movement, with its modern atmosphere, its modern force, and its
modern audacity, he must needs insert passages here and there that go
right back to the eighteenth century, in their form, their speech, and
their psychology. Something of the same phenomenon meets us again in
his Symphony in F minor (op. 12). The singular thing is that he has
never had a real Beethoven epoch, or a real Schumann epoch, or a real
Wagner epoch; but that he seemed to fall quite naturally, at times,
into bygone modes of feeling and utterance, like a man whose prose
style had an unaccountable tendency to lapse, every now and then, into
reminiscences of the authors he read most in his youth. The _Guntram_
(op. 25) may have looked very Wagnerian when it first appeared; but
as we read it now, in the light of Strauss's later work, it is clear
that Wagner does not enter into a twentieth part of the opera. People
could pick out the passages that resembled Wagner--particularly that
extraordinary reminiscence of _Tristan_ which Strauss seems to use
so unconsciously--and sum the whole opera up as the work of a mere
disciple of Wagner. It was hard in those days to grasp the significance
of the more individual parts of _Guntram_, or to frame to oneself
a connected scheme of what the composer's psychological processes
were. But we can see it all now, after _Also sprach Zarathustra_,
_Don Quixote_, _Enoch Arden_ and the songs; and it is evident that
_Guntram_ never owed its origin to Wagner, but to a mind of quite a
different type from his. It is not Wagner's texture, it is above all
not Wagner's world-view; it comes from a brain of a different outlook,
making its own terminology for itself as it goes along, and only
occasionally dropping into the idiom of Strauss's great forerunner. So
again with the much-cited influence of Liszt upon him. That the flower
of Strauss's achievement has grown up from the soil Liszt watered is
unquestionable. But no one work, no section of one work, can be quoted
that sounds as if it came direct from Liszt. With the exception of some
half-dozen of the juvenile writings, there is nothing of Strauss that
does not, in spite of its suggestions of this or that predecessor,
belong as completely to him as _Orfeo_ does to Gluck or _Lohengrin_ to
Wagner; while in the work of the last few years, the years of attained
maturity and full self-consciousness, he stands proudly, loftily alone,
unique among musicians long before he had reached his fortieth year.
Yet the tradition that he is merely an artificial blend of Wagner and
Liszt will probably hold the field for a long time to come.
So great, again, is the distance between his earlier and his later
work that one who only knows him from the efforts of his adolescence
is certain to misconceive him. The present Strauss commands respect
even from those who think he is merely using his great gifts to
achieve perversity and ugliness; but we may go through page after
page of his earliest work and yet hardly once come across anything
that would make us believe we were face to face with genius. Some of
it, like the _Fünf Klavierstücke_ (op. 3) and the _Stimmungsbilder_
(op. 9), is quite mediocre at times, commonplace in rhythm, weak in
structure, and decidedly cheap in melody. Even where his early work
was most excellent--and some of it was admirable--it was impossible to
say from it that the composer was one of the predestined spirits of
music, fated to remove landmarks, to explore undiscovered countries.
Clearly it was not a common talent; even in those days it was generally
vigorous, audacious, self-confident; but it rarely flamed up into
incandescence. In those years of apprenticeship Strauss was quietly
and almost unconsciously evolving a musical bias that was to re-mould
the æsthetics of music--doubtful yet as to whither his own ideals
were drawing him, and no doubt puzzled at times at his failure to
get precisely the picture he would have liked, but still remaining
autonomous, a new and vigorous force aiming at an idiom of its own.
We see now how hopelessly absurd it is to judge the composer of _Also
sprach Zarathustra_ by any of the standards of the past--that the
man's whole mind is unique, seeing things in music that no one ever
saw before, and taking the most direct, even if most perilous, path to
the expression of them. It took him a long time to learn that he had
no great faculty for abstract beauty, for weaving the impalpable stuff
of a vision into something that lives and shall be immortal, like the
sculptor's work, by virtue of the sheer harmony of every element of its
being. The great test of the existence of this order of beauty in a
musician is to be had in his slow movements. Mere vigour of rhythm and
intensity of colour here go for less than anywhere else: in this ideal,
abstracted world, where the soul listens darkling, brooding upon the
mystery of things like the dove upon the waters, the musician's sense
of sheer self-existent beauty must be at its finest; and the complete
absorption in pure tone that such a mood demands is the quality of the
absolute rather than of the poetic musician. I am not for a moment,
of course, denying that Strauss has written some slow passages which
are surcharged with emotional beauty--such as the "Redemption" theme
at the end of _Tod und Verklärung_, the noble _mit Andacht_ section at
the beginning of _Also sprach Zarathustra_, the pathetic death-music
in _Don Quixote_, or the end of _Ein Heldenleben_. What I mean is that
his is not the order of musical mind to which the extended formalism
of the symphony, with its intentness on architectonic effect, is the
most propitious. His genius is for the literary rather than for the
architectural or sculpturesque.
Look, for example, at his songs. If his gift were for sheer musical
beauty, the melody that sings from pure joy in itself, it would
certainly appear here if anywhere. Yet among all his songs I cannot
recall more than one or two that seem to be written out of the mere
heart of lyrism itself; while in all the really great ones the magic
and the power come not from pure melodic or harmonic loveliness, but
from the sense they give us of absolute emotional veracity--as it
were a man speaking upon a lofty subject very gravely and with intense
conviction, and so attaining, not the rapturous abandonment of poetry,
but an eloquent, impassioned, heart-searching prose.
Strauss is perhaps not a great melodist, if we restrict that term to
the meaning it has acquired in the absolute music of the past. Only
once, I think--in the slow movement of the Piano Quartet (op. 13)--does
he sing himself into that ideal world of ecstasy and enchantment in
which the older musicians spent their most golden hours. Here, indeed,
he loses sight of that real world of men and things which it has been
his glory to make musical for us in his later work; here, indeed, he
is content to sing in rapt absorption, content to pour out a flood of
tone that shall be all it is meant to be if it is divine, merely "a
wonder and a wild desire." This movement stands unique among Strauss's
work, both in its pure beauty and in its æsthetic purpose. For once in
his life, at all events, the great realist has had his honeyed hour
of idealism. But the very qualities of alertness, of quick interest
in life, which have gone to make Strauss, in his later music, the
symbol of a new era of æsthetics, have prevented him from falling
often into that ecstatic, clairvoyant swoon from which the music of
the great dreamers has been born. A melody, with him, is not something
irresponsibly beautiful, as sheer a delight to the ear as the flight
of a bird or the play of sunlight on the water are to the eye, but
a commentary upon a character or a situation, aiming at veracity
in the first place rather than at self-existent beauty. Hence that
impression of tortuous, huddled drawing which we get at times in a
work like _Guntram_, where his hand has not yet learned to follow the
inward vision with complete fidelity. Hence also the feeling given
us occasionally, by some of his melodies, that they are bordering
perilously on the commonplace or the obvious--as in the cadence of
the charming little folk-song with which _Till Eulenspiegel_ ends,
or in one or two portions of the finale of _Tod und Verklärung_. The
closer a musician comes to pure simplicity the more difficult is it to
achieve verisimilitude without dropping into bathos. If Strauss has now
and again made us feel that it is only a step from the sublime to the
ridiculous, it behoves us to remember also that no musician has ever
been so triumphant in his handling of the simplest material--as in some
passages of _Also sprach Zarathustra_, the ending of _Ein Heldenleben_,
the Sancho Panza music in _Don Quixote_, or the music of the children
in _Feuersnot_. If Tchaikovski brought the last new shudder into music,
Strauss has endowed it with a new simplicity. It is this, indeed, that
makes him Strauss; for paradoxical as it may seem, this builder of
colossal tone-poems, this wielder of the mightiest orchestral language
ever yet spoken, this Mad Mullah of harmony, is what he is because he
has dared to throw over almost all the conventions that have clustered
round the art in the last two hundred years. He is complex because he
is simple; he appears so wildly artificial because he is absolutely
natural; he is called sophisticated because he casts aside all artifice
and speaks like the natural musical man. To establish which position,
let us digress for a moment into a discussion of æsthetics.