Upon some features of that psychology--its sincerity, its originality,
its artistic fearlessness--I have already touched. Strauss, however,
is an epoch-making man not only in virtue of his expression and his
technique, but in virtue of the range and the quality of his subjects.
He is the first complete realist in music. The Romantic movement came
to a somewhat belated head in Wagner, who had been the chief master
of the ceremonies at the prolonged funeral of the classical spirit.
The Romantic movement persisted longer in music than in any of the
other arts; and even in our own day it still makes an occasional
ineffectual effort to raise its old head, ludicrous now with its faded
garlands of flowers overhanging the wrinkled cheeks. But it has done
its work, and the future is with the men who live not in that old and
somewhat artificial world of gloomy forests, enchanted castles, men
that are like gods and gods that are like men, impossible maidens, and
superannuated professors of magic,[63] but in a world recognisably
similar to that in which we ourselves move from day to day. We like our
art to have a rather more acrid taste, and to come to closer quarters
with reality. Even the apparatus of the Wagnerian opera seems to us a
trifle _vieux-jeu_ in these days. Strauss has wisely recognised that
the operatic form, at its worst a ludicrous parody on life, is at its
best only a compromise, limited in its choice of subjects no less than
in its structure. Much greater freedom is to be had in the symphonic
poem, or in other purely instrumental modern forms, because here we
have at once a wider range of subjects open to us, and a medium of
expression into which the voice, with its limiting associations, does
not enter. Nothing but the freest, most expansive of forms could be
suited to the peculiar temperament of a realist like Strauss, and fine
as his own opera work is, bubbling over, as _Feuersnot_ is, with life
and humour, it is not there that we see the essential Strauss.
For it is as a realist that he is most remarkable. He is not a dreamer,
nor a philosopher, except in so far as philosophy--in Mr. Meredith's
sense of the term--is at the centre of every great artist's vision of
life. He is at his best in studies of character in action, as in _Till
Eulenspiegel_ and _Don Quixote_; and he follows his trail with the most
cheerful disregard as to whether his work is or is not formal music
in the older acceptations of the word. Further, his interest is in
human life as a whole, not in the one wearisome episode of the eternal
masculine and the eternal feminine. Strauss's is the cleanest, most
sexless, most athletic music I know. Just as it is the easiest thing
in the world to make love, so is the making of love-music the easiest
part of the musician's trade. It is one other sign of the death of the
Romantic spirit and the revival of realism in Strauss that he should
have thrown over almost all the old erotic tags of the musician--though
he can be passionate enough upon occasion--in order to tell the story,
in the true modern spirit, of other elements in human life that also
have their poetry and their pathos. One refreshing characteristic of
the earlier works--such as the Piano Sonata, the Violin Sonata, and
the Piano Quartet--was their unclouded virility, their total freedom
from those phantasms of sex that have been hovering over so much of
our music during the past century. The adolescent work of Strauss is
proud, vigorous, uncontaminated, Greek in quality. Even in the _Don
Juan_, it may be noted, his interest is in another aspect of the story
than the blatantly erotic; and the music itself is plainly not the work
of a Romanticist but of a realist and humanist. The love-themes in
_Don Juan_ are not sexual in the way that Wagner or Tchaikovski, for
example, would have made them. Even in his songs his love-making is
grave and philosophical, with none of the feline sex-element showing
through it that is so prominent in Wagner; Strauss is untroubled by the
_hysterica passio_ of the tiles. For this generation, at all events,
the last word in mere sex-music has been said in _Tristan and Isolde_;
and instead of imitating his weaker brethren, who occupy themselves
energetically in vending the spilth of Wagner's wine, Strauss has
turned his eyes upon other elements than the erotic in the human
composition. Hence the cosmic magnificence of conception of _Also
sprach Zarathustra_, the graphic humour of _Till Eulenspiegel_, and the
supreme humanity of his greatest work, _Don Quixote_.
I call this his greatest work, because it is the one in which his
qualities of realist and humanist come to their finest flower. It
has all the fervour of _Don Juan_, and all the humour of _Till
Eulenspiegel_, with a technique still more amazing than that of either
of these works, and that riper feeling that could only come to him
with the process of the years. I would rank the _Don Quixote_ higher
even than _Also sprach Zarathustra_, because of this sensation that
it gives us of the enormous fund of sincere emotion that underlies
all Strauss's audacity and cleverness, and that never leaves him
even in his moments of most reckless humour. Certainly _Also sprach
Zarathustra_ is a marvellous work; no such overwhelming picture of man
and the universe has ever before been unfolded to our eyes in music; it
almost makes the world-philosophy of Wagner seem, in comparison, like
the bleat of evangelical orthodoxy. But it is in the _Don Quixote_ that
Strauss is most really and truly himself and most thoroughly human.
It is here also that every trace of other men's style has definitely
disappeared, for even in _Also sprach Zarathustra_ we seem at times to
catch the voice of Liszt. The _Don Quixote_ marks the final rupture of
the realist and the romantic schools in music. I say nothing here of
its technique, though that alone is sufficient to make one ask oneself
whether it is possible for music to develop further than this. Nowhere,
outside the work of glorious old Bach, is there such a combination in
music of inexhaustible fertility of imagination and the most rigid
austerity in the choice of material. Description would avail nothing
for these aspects of _Don Quixote_; every student must revel in the
riches of the work on his own account. But when we consider its more
human qualities, the _Don Quixote_ must be pronounced an epoch-making
work, both in its form and its psychology. It is not a symphonic
poem, but a series of variations upon practically three themes--Don
Quixote, Sancho Panza, and Dulcinea; and for wit, humour, pathos,
and humanism there is nothing like it in the whole library of music.
Certainly to any one who knows Strauss's music of _Don Quixote_, the
story of Cervantes is henceforth inconceivable without it; the story
itself, indeed, has not half the humour 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. We have had our immortal
lyrists, our sculptors, our dramatists, our builders of exquisite
temples; we now come to the writers of fiction, to our Flaubert and
Tourgeniev and Dostoievski. And here 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, the
one instrument in the world that is suitable for the prose fiction in
music that it is Strauss's destiny to develop. 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. It must be said that prose is
born of yesterday; verse is the form _par excellence_ of the ancient
literatures. All the prosodic combinations have been made; but those of
prose are still to make."
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 suggestion 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 main sign of new and independent life in music since
Wagner; for it perpetually spurs us on to fresh problems of æsthetics,
of psychology, and of form.