It is not difficult to understand the attitude of musical purists
towards Strauss, and of many others who are not altogether purists.
There is something provocative, defiant, almost repellent, in the
power of the man's genius. He is so enormously strong, so proudly
self-confident, that he joys in flouting the world in the face as it
has never been flouted before. His whole career is a testimony to
how far courage and resource can carry a man. According to all known
precedents, he ought to have struggled for years, vainly endeavouring
to get a bare hearing; when he was actually performed he should have
been crushed under critical ridicule and poisoned with critical venom;
he should have had a ceaseless fight with singers, with players, with
opera-houses, with publishers, with concert-givers, and have perished
miserably, a martyr to an impossible ideal. For sheer indifference
to other people's opinion, for sheer determination to go his own way
without regard for all the time-honoured conventions, there is simply
nothing like him in the history of music. Yet his career has been one
of unbroken triumph. At the age of forty he is not only recognised as
the most astonishing of European musicians, but there is no demand
of his, no matter how imperious, that people do not gladly hasten to
fulfil. In _Zarathustra_ he apparently reaches the limits of what can
be demanded from a human orchestra; yet in _Don Quixote_, and again
in _Ein Heldenleben_, he strains their breaking sinews to a still
higher tension; while in the _Symphonia domestica_ he treats them and
us with a superb, tyrannic insolence. Never before has an orchestra
of sixty-two strings, two harps, a piccolo, three flutes, two oboes,
an oboe d'amore, a cor anglais, five clarinets, five bassoons, four
saxophones, eight horns, four trumpets, three trombones, a bass tuba,
four kettledrums, a triangle, a tambourine, a glockenspiel, cymbals,
and a big drum, been required to describe a day in the life of a baby;
never before have the energies of over a hundred able-bodied men been
bent to such a task. He tunes his strings below the normal limit just
as he likes; he employs obsolete instruments, and others that are
never used in concert-orchestras; he multiplies difficulties, and,
by reason of the many rehearsals required, makes performances of his
works enormously expensive affairs. Yet he does it all with sublime
impunity. An Oriental potentate riding his horse contemptuously over
the prostrate bodies of a half-adoring, half-resentful populace, is the
only image that will justly describe him in his forceful, irresistible
career. The gods have indeed smiled on Strauss. Much of his success,
or of his power to command success, may no doubt be due to financial
causes; he has never had to fight the world with an empty purse and
empty stomach. But still he is the most remarkable phenomenon the
musical world has ever seen; no composer ever insulted us one quarter
so much without having the life drubbed out of him.
He is evidently a man of enormous nervous energy. You can see it,
for one thing, in the style of his melodies. They are remarkable for
their huge leaps, the great arcs they traverse, the wide distances
between their parts--all pointing to great waves of nervous energy that
cannot be confined within the narrow bounds of the ordinary melody.
Occasionally it does him rather a disservice; it becomes his master
instead of his servant. There is really no need for this incessant
piling-up of more and more sound in the orchestra; its one sufficient
condemnation is that frequently no result comes out commensurate with
the huge means that have to be employed. Thousands of pages of our
modern music would be equally great, equally moving, with a vastly
smaller expenditure of effort. A man like Strauss takes an exuberant
joy, the joy of a healthy athlete doing difficult feats, in weaving
a musical texture that is a marvel of ingenious technique. It looks,
and really is, wonderful on paper; but there is no gainsaying that
precisely the same effect could often be achieved by much simpler
means. Now and again we find ourselves saying that line after line
might have been struck out of the score without any of the final effect
being lost. Nay, Strauss's absorption in the pure joy of scoring
occasionally leads him into errors of technique that a smaller man
would have escaped. In the dance in _Zarathustra_, for example, his
excessive subdivision of the strings merely results in the waltz-theme
coming out far too feebly. His own specification at the beginning
of the score is for sixteen first violins (to consider this section
alone). In the waltz he divides them into (1) first desk, (2) second,
third, fourth, and fifth desks. Then he divides the first desk again,
giving part of them an arpeggio figure, and the remainder a theme in
two parts, involving a further subdivision of this small remainder. The
result is that the melody is shorn of all its power. He has marked it
_forte_, but a _forte_ is impossible, even with the proper toning down
of the rest of the strings. There is no earthly need for such a page as
this. The whole strength of the strings is frittered away upon things
that do not come out, and would be quite unimportant if they did come
out; and the really important theme is shorn of all its impressiveness.
There is really no necessity for a great deal of the orchestral
complexity in which Strauss now and then delights. It is not essential
to the proper presentation of his ideas; it puts an unnecessary strain
on the time and the nerves of the orchestra; and it tempts young
admirers to go and do likewise, with results absolutely fatal to their
chance of getting a performance from any conductor.
It may be that we are only beating the air in calling Strauss's
attention to facts like these; it may be that without his defects we
should not have his qualities, that the turbulent flood of energy that
leads him into occasional extravagances of scoring is only part of the
greater flood that makes his inspiration the colossal, overwhelming
thing it is. All through the man's brain there is a touch of disorder,
a strain of something or other abnormal, that makes it hard for him
to work at anything for ten minutes without an irresistible desire
surging up in him to deface it. He works at the picture like the soul
of inspiration itself; then suddenly a saturnine whim shoots along
his nerves, and he makes a long erratic stroke with the brush that
comes perilously near to destroying the harmony of the whole thing.
An able critic once expressed it to me, after a performance of _Ein
Heldenleben_, that Strauss as a composer was something like Rubinstein
as a pianist--he cannot go through anything of any length without doing
at least one foolish thing in it. Roughly speaking he was right. Shall
we say that in every great musician there is a flaw in the mental
structure that has to show in one way or another, and that those are
lucky in whom it does not show in their music? So much folly, that
is, is given to each of them, and it has to come out somewhere. In
Wagner it came out in the prose works; they were a beneficent scheme
of Providence for sweeping the brain free of its cobwebs, and leaving
the purified instrument in all the better condition for its music.
Beethoven's madness came out in his private life, again leaving the
brain working in music in perfect ease and balance. Strauss does not
write prose works like Wagner, and does not, like Beethoven, pour
the water all over himself when he is washing his hands, or use a
lady's candle-snuffers as a tooth-pick. He is distressingly normal
in these respects; and lacking such safety valves for the little bit
of folly there is in him, it unfortunately comes out in his music. In
the earlier days he could give full rein to his humour, his power of
characterisation, with the minimum of desire to irritate his hearer
for the pure love of the thing; in _Till Eulenspiegel_, for example,
it is almost all pure delight, a flow of wit and humour that only
for a moment or two is interrupted by the antics of the mischievous
schoolboy. But after that the tendency grew seriously on Strauss to
mar his picture by some piece of malicious folly, to thrust his head
through the canvas and grin at the public, or to place his thumb to his
nose and extend his fingers at them in a derisive flourish.
It is in _Ein Heldenleben_ that this tendency is seen at its worst.
With all its great beauties and its titanic powers, it remains finally
less satisfactory than it easily might have been. It is not all bathed
in the one light; the picture has been seen disconnectedly; it is
an attempt at the marriage of contrarieties. The great question is,
What does _Ein Heldenleben_ purport to represent? Is it meant for a
purely objective painting of a hero--a representation, as it were, of
the hero, _per se_--or is it intended, in parts at least, to draw the
hearer's attention to the personality of Strauss himself? The official
explanation of the work--authorised, we are told, by the composer--is
that _Ein Heldenleben_ is meant as a kind of pendant to _Don Quixote_.
There he had sketched an individual figure, "whose vain search after
heroism leads to insanity." Here he was concerned to present "not a
single poetic or historical figure, but rather a more general and free
ideal of great and manly heroism"; and the idea that the hero of the
poem is anywhere Strauss himself is scouted vigorously.
Now, as regards the general handling of the music, it is, I think,
because Strauss has had this generalised picture in his mind that he
has here come to grief. _Don Quixote_ is such a masterpiece of humanism
precisely because Strauss has confined himself to a strictly human
figure. You can psychologise both broadly and minutely about a human
character, but it is extremely difficult to make a pure abstraction
interesting. At every step you are likely to fall into either the
bombastic or the commonplace. Especially in music should an abstraction
be treated as broadly as possible; the only hope of salvation lies in
avoiding an absurd contrast between the particular and the general.
This is precisely what Strauss, with all his genius, has not succeeded
in avoiding; and when we come to examine his scheme a little more
closely, we have every reason to be dissatisfied with the authorised
version of its purport. In the first place, this hero in the abstract,
this representative of "a more general and free ideal of great and
manly heroism," becomes less and less a generalised type as the work
goes on, and at last--in spite of what the inspired commentators may
say--strikes a great many of us as being nothing more nor less than a
musician--rather a singular narrowing, surely, of the conception of a
hero; and this musician has a curious resemblance to Strauss himself.
No official disclaimers can get rid of those twenty or twenty-five
quotations from Strauss's own earlier works which figure as "the
Hero's Works of Peace" in the authorised analysis. The ingenious
remark of the analyst, that "quoting salient features from his most
important works, he lets us see that the experiences of the hero have
also been his own," is really the idlest trifling. When a man sets
out to describe a typical hero, a "general and free ideal of great
and manly heroism," he does not, as a rule, give as samples of that
universal hero's activity a bunch of quotations from almost every work
he himself has already written. To have done this seriously would have
argued a ludicrous egoism in Strauss; and, in spite of the official
story, I prefer to believe that he was not quite so absurd as this.
We are here face to face with that curious muddling of the purpose,
that perverse desire to stick his own head through the canvas, that is
occasionally so characteristic of him. He cannot resist the impulse at
once to exhibit his marvellous technique, and to fling a pot of paint
in the public's face, as Ruskin said of Whistler; and the result is
this wonderfully clever but psychologically unjustifiable rhapsody
upon himself, inserted in the middle of what is meant to be a purely
objective portrait of a hero. It is not easy, again, to understand the
significance or see the appropriateness of the section entitled "The
Hero's Battlefield." If ever there was anything in music that could
be said to aim at suggesting, crudely and melodramatically, the horror
and the nervous excitement of a physical conflict between armed hosts,
it is this section, with its appalling and hideous racket, that sounds
like strenuous boiler-riveting. But _musicians_ do not fight battles
of this kind, surely; and a scheme that represents a hero whose "works
of peace" are purely intellectual becomes nonsense when it depicts
him fighting like a Hooligan among Hooligans, bludgeoning and being
bludgeoned.
It is all due, of course, to this muddling up of the two plans--that
of a very definite hero whom Strauss knows very well, and that of
a generalised and indefinite hero whom he finds himself compelled
to describe in the biggest superlatives. The two conceptions will
not equate, will not blend; the one is always trying to destroy the
other. All through the work one is dimly conscious of an absence of
homogeneity, of failure to make the general scheme as coherent and
convincing as it might be; though the man's genius is so titanic that
it almost kills our criticism while we are listening to the work. It is
a pity, too, that he should sacrifice for a moment the nobility of the
general scheme in order to turn aside for a trifling _jeu d'esprit_, in
the notorious section that treats of the hero's antagonists. There is
cleverness in the characterisation; Strauss is painting the portraits
of individual critics who have annoyed him, and those who have seen
him, at rehearsal, suggest to the eyes of the players the different
types he is satirising, must needs laugh even against their own will.
But the section as a whole is a monstrosity; and it is lamentable to
see a great genius turn aside from that mighty statue that he has just
begun to carve, in order to vent his personal feeling against his
personal antagonists. It is simply a crime against art.
V
It is in _Ein Heldenleben_, more than anywhere else, that we have the
defects of Strauss's qualities. He is of the type that, masterly as
its self-control generally is, cannot refrain at times from becoming
defiantly extravagant. It all goes along with his enormous vital
energy, that energy which is met with in only one or two men in every
century, and that invariably prompts its possessor now and then to the
commission of something or other we would rather have had left undone.
There is in Strauss something of the _débordement_ of Rabelais, a lust
of existence and of apprehension too big to be kept within normal
bounds. There is something in him, too, of Hokusai--that colossal
genius whose eager spirit seemed to try to fill every corner, every
crevice, of the visible world; something of the Japanese artist's
interest in all forms of life, something too of the same occasional
corruption of the imagination--as in the unfinished series of prints
entitled _The Hundred Tales_, where the artist, out of the very excess
of his power and ardour, turns life into a hideous, terrifying mockery
of itself. Strauss is cosmic in his understanding and his sympathies,
but not as men like Goethe and Leonardo are, whose vision is always
clear, and whose energies are always held in check by another energy
higher than themselves; like Rabelais, like Hokusai, like Goya, there
come to him moments when the flood of life within him overflows, and
he is hardly master of the strange shapes that issue from his brain. A
positive artistic rage seizes him, and he embraces life with an ardour
that is cruel, brutal--a passion that has a touch of Sadism in it.
If this enormous sensitiveness to everything that goes on in the
world, and this quickness of reaction of the imagination upon it
all, are answerable for Strauss's occasional lapses from good taste,
they account also for the profounder and more vital qualities of his
art--his humour and his humanism, the qualities that make _Feuersnot_
so delightful and _Don Quixote_ so exceedingly great. London treated
the latter work unkindly at its solitary hearing of it; it is, indeed,
too vast, too many-sided, to be understood at first acquaintance.
One critic called it "ugly, laboured, and eccentric"; another wrote
that it "contains more sheer ugliness than any other score written
by any responsible person of whom we have ever heard, or whose work
we have ever studied.... Everything seems in _Don Quixote_ to be
discordant for the sheer sake of discord.... We condemn that work
from every musicianly point of view; the thing is an artistic
arrogance, an attempt to make the best out of the worst, ... utterly
and completely a failure; it has no recommendation of beauty, not
even the recommendation of fine construction; it is a hopeless piece
of exaggerated and intentional cleverness." Well, a significant
thing happened on the very night on which _Don Quixote_ created such
heartburning. This frightfully complex work, which was absolutely
unknown to more than perhaps ten people in the audience, and was
consequently misunderstood almost from first to last, was followed by
the much earlier _Tod und Verklärung_, a work which itself, a few years
ago, was looked upon as perilously near folly and ugliness. Anyone who
now thinks _Tod und Verklärung_ a tough nut to crack is looked upon as
a hopeless Conservative in music, so very quickly does the world move
in these matters. Even the _Times_ said that after _Don Quixote_ the
_Tod und Verklärung_ sounded quite sane and normal, or words to that
effect. We know how _Also sprach Zarathustra_ was received in 1897,
and how accustomed we have grown to it since then, on the strength of
some three or four performances; we know how many people who shied
nervously at the first performance of _Ein Heldenleben_ now take it as
easily as a cat laps milk. In the face of facts like these, is it not
somewhat hasty to bespatter the _Don Quixote_ with opprobrious epithets
on the strength of just one performance? People have blundered over
Strauss before, and been compelled to eat their words when they came
to know him better; they have run away from the ogre like frightened
children, only to discover long after that the supposed ogre was a
kindly and well-disposed person, of something more than ordinary human
build perhaps, but still on the plane of normal, not sub-normal nor
super-normal, humanity. I say with confidence that they will in time
admit that they have gone grievously astray over _Don Quixote_. It lies
on the mere surface of the matter that some parts of it are ravishingly
beautiful; you have only to play for yourself on the piano the death
music, or the Don's long eulogy of the knightly life, to feel the
very heart leap within you. If this is not surpassingly great music
there is no music in the world worthy of the name. Of other parts the
beauty will be perceived when the work is better known; and the _Don
Quixote_ will then be recognised to be in some ways the profoundest,
noblest thing Strauss has ever done. It is, of course, extraordinarily
realistic in its imitations at times, and I can imagine how the sheep
and the wind-machine jar on the nerves of ordinarily sensitive people.
But you must just laugh at these things and pass them by, take them
as a piece of deliberate musical impertinence, and laugh with the
composer, not at him. It is really a gratuitous assumption that Strauss
is a fool because he has given free wing to his _diablerie_ here and
there; he knows as well as any one the precise value of all this kind
of thing, but he apparently claims that once or twice in a lifetime
it is worth doing for the pure fun of it. We must first of all get
the right point of view if we are to understand _Don Quixote_. It is
all set in a strange, mad atmosphere; the folly that hovers round
it is part of the psychology of the piece; and it is the perfect
transmutation of the mental processes of Quixote into tone that makes
the work so wonderful, so unique. If a man is not smitten through and
through by the pathos of section after section of the piece, I can only
say, for my part, that he has not grasped the real significance of the
work. Frequent hearing of it will make the extraordinarily original
musical tissue quite familiar to men's ears, and when this has been
done there will be no bar to the comprehension of the profoundly human
psychology of a masterpiece that only Strauss could have written. The
score is a treasure-house of true and noble things, which only come
to you in full force when you have steeped yourself in its strange
atmosphere. Take, for example, the variation immediately preceding the
Finale, representing the weary homeward ride of Quixote and Sancho
after the Don's defeat by the Knight of the White Moon. In these long
descending wails of the orchestra you have all the anguish, all the
disillusionment of the poor knight painted with an expressiveness,
a fidelity, that sets one thinking of visual as well as auditory
things. He illustrates the scene as consummately as a pictorial artist
could do, and at the same time throws over it the melting melancholy
that music alone among the arts can express. You can see these poor
broken creatures, with bowed heads, pacing wearily along on steeds
no less sorry, no less bruised than themselves. The whole thing
breathes physical and mental fatigue and moral despair. The score of
_Don Quixote_ is full of a human quality that we rarely get to such
perfection anywhere else, even in Strauss; and London lost a golden
opportunity in not taking the work to its heart at once. As it was, the
more obvious bits of realism in it revolted a good many people, and
left them with insufficient patience to seek beneath the better kind
of humour for the pathos that underlies it; while the extraordinary
complexity of the musical tissue was all against a comprehension of the
work at a first hearing.
What makes the _Don Quixote_ so great a work is, in a word, the wise
and tender humanity of its humour. We can put aside, if we like, all
the wonderful witchery of its technique, its extraordinary graphic
power, its exhilarating and amusing imitations of reality--for there
is here a descriptive sense surpassing in its manifestations _Till
Eulenspiegel_ and _Ein Heldenleben_ at their best. The wise man, who
accepts with thankfulness all that music can give him, will not reject
all this with a sneer and a condescending remark about music "confining
itself to its proper province." The day has gone by for primitive
academic æsthetics of that kind. But I do not want to lay stress upon
this side of _Don Quixote_, simply because there is infinitely more in
the work than this. It represents musical character-sketching brought
to a finer point of perfection than can be met with anywhere outside
the magic world of Wagner. But it differs from Wagner's drawing in
that it is less opulent, more concise, more sharply conceived; it is
wholly appropriate to the sketching block upon which the characters are
drawn, just as Wagner's heroic figures depend upon and are justified
by the huge canvas and the gorgeous range of colour that he is able
to devote to them. The _Don Quixote_ puts us in mind of first-rate
book-illustration; we could hardly see the characters more distinctly,
both in themselves and in relation to their surroundings, if they were
set before us in black and white.
And how tender the drawing is, how exquisitely human is the feeling
for these two poor tragic-comic actors! It is this that finally makes
the work so precious--its unfailing pity, its intuitive avoidance of
anything that would make it simply unthinking comedy. Strauss's Sancho
is very humorous, but your laughter at him is always softened with
tears; while the portrait of Quixote has an added touch of pathos
in that it invariably suggests the spare, worn frame of the poor,
middle-aged knight. It is true in this as in every other respect. His
love-singing is that of a middle-aged man; the pitiful sorrow that
envelops the ride homeward after his defeat is that of middle-age; the
knight is broken, disillusioned, as only men can be whose physical as
well as mental forces have passed their prime. For my part, I can no
longer think of Cervantes's story without Strauss's music, just as I
cannot think of Goethe's _Erl King_ without the music of Schubert, or
of the _Lorelei_ without the music of Liszt.
"The German literary laugh," says Mr. Meredith, in his _Essay on
Comedy_, "like the timed awakenings of their Barbarossa in the hollows
of the Untersberg, is infrequent, and rather monstrous--never a laugh
of men and women in concert. It comes of unrefined abstract fancy,
grotesque or grim, or gross, like the peculiar humours of their
little earthmen. Spiritual laughter they have not yet attained to."
So much may be said, I think, of some of Strauss's laughter. Here and
there--in _Ein Heldenleben_, for example--it seems to come from the
dry and wizened throat of the "little earthman"; it is not yet broadly
and deeply human, not yet cosmopolitan in its appeal. His humour on
occasions like this is very like Jean Paul's; you hardly know whether
he is laughing with you or at you--perhaps he does not quite know
himself. But in _Don Quixote_ you have the philosophic laughter of
the great humanist. It is not to be found there only among Strauss's
works. It gave warmth and pathos to _Till Eulenspiegel_--for wonderful
humoresque as that is, its informing spirit is something much more
complex and much more pity-moving than the idly humorous. We have
assimilated only half of _Till Eulenspiegel_ if we see nothing but
_diablerie_ in it. But it is in _Don Quixote_ that the blending of
tears and laughter is most perfect; and I, for my part, would gladly
sacrifice _Ein Heldenleben_ for this, were I compelled to make the
choice, just as I would relinquish the epic and dramatic grandeur of
_Die Götterdämmerung_ if I might have left to me _Die Meistersinger_,
with its perpetual truth, its perpetual sanity, its perpetual appeal to
real men and women in a real world.
------------------------------------
It will be seen from page 252 that the foregoing essay was set up
in type before the _Symphonia domestica_ was produced in London in
February last. That performance threw a new light on Strauss and his
art, and calls for some few words of comment. We need not here go very
deeply into the question of how much or how little programme there is
in the work. There is a strain of foolishness in Strauss that always
prompts him to go through the heavy farce of mystifying his hearers
at first. He tells them he prefers not to give them the clue to his
literary scheme, but wants them to accept the work as absolute music;
this was his tactic, for example, with _Till Eulenspiegel_. All the
while he gives one clue after another to his personal friends, till
at length sufficient information is gathered to reconstruct the story
that he had worked upon; this gradually gets into all the programme
books, and then we are able to listen to the work in the only way it
_can_ be listened to with any comprehension--with a full knowledge of
the programme. So it is now with the _Symphonia domestica_. He has
told us that "he wished the work to be judged as absolute music"; he
has also told us that "he had in his mind a very definite programme
when composing the symphony." Some of his admirers, with a canine
fidelity that is positively touching, have tried to reconcile these
contradictory positions by ingenious dialectic. That, however, is
taking Strauss's whimsies just a little too seriously; it suggests the
Shakespearologists of the George Dawson type, who used to tell us that
even "if there is anything you do not understand or which you think
is wrong in Shakespeare, you may safely conclude that he is right and
you are wrong." We need not discuss Strauss's self-contradictions as
if they were æsthetic antinomies that could be resolved by an Hegelian
dialectic in a more profound harmony; the real explanation is simply
that we are dealing with a man of erratic nerves, a musician not very
well used to consistent thinking, whose sense of humour sometimes
skittishly takes a turning along which it is hardly worth our while to
follow it. There is not the faintest doubt that the whole symphony is
founded on a very definite programme, and that we shall know it all one
of these days, as we now know the minutest details of the programmes of
_Till Eulenspiegel_ and _Ein Heldenleben_.
Then the question arises, is the programme of the _Symphonia domestica_
intrinsically interesting? It avowedly illustrates a day in the
composer's family life, "and we are told"--to quote Messrs. Pitt
and Kalisch, the authors of the admirable Queen's Hall analytical
book--"that it illustrates such everyday incidents as a Walk in the
Country, the Baby's Evening and Morning Bath, the Striking of the
Clock, the Yawns of the Parents when awakened by the Child, and so
on." They will have it, however, that there is more in the work than
this, and that underneath this "trivial subject" there is "one of far
deeper and wider import"--_i.e._ "not so much a day in the life of a
particular family as a realisation of the joys and griefs of motherhood
and paternity, the gradual growth of the child-soul, and the mutual
relationship of children and parents...." But this exalted theory
soon comes to grief. It is quite clear that the striking of seven in
the evening and again in the morning confines the time of the drama
within twelve hours; and on these lines indeed there is some sense in
the programme. That is, we see in the first section the parents and
child; in the second (the _scherzo_) the joys and diversions of the
group, the lullaby, the striking of 7 P.M., and the putting of the
child to bed; in the third (the _adagio_), the parents' love-scene
and the striking of 7 A.M.; in the fourth (the _finale_) the morning
wakening, and--in the double fugue--the dispute between the parents
as to the future of the child. This is not a very great scheme, but
it is at least comprehensible; mix Teutonic moonshine up with it and
it becomes nonsense. Thus Messrs. Pitt and Kalisch, trying to put the
best face possible on that stupid noise that is meant to illustrate
"the energetic protests of the child when it is first brought into
contact with the alien element of cold water" (by the way, _are_
babies usually dumped into cold water?) remark that "if the more
idealistic method of interpretation be adopted, it may be taken as a
very uncompromising musical picture of the earliest struggles of a
new-born soul." But this "idealistic method" will not work. The episode
in question occurs just before the clock strikes 7 P.M. It occurs
again just before the clock strikes 7 A.M. Are we to understand, then,
that the "new-born soul" is born once in the evening and again next
morning? This is being "born again" with a vengeance--quick work even
in these days of Welsh revivals and Torrey-Alexander missions! No, we
must reject the "idealistic method of interpretation," and just settle
down to the plain fact that Strauss is painting nothing more ideal than
the baby squalling in its bath (hot or cold), just as in other works
he has painted Till's death-rattle, the dying shudder of Don Juan,
the windmill and the sheep of Don Quixote, and the braying of Sancho
Panza's donkey--all frankly realistic things, which we do not attempt
to gild with idealistic interpretations.
I lay stress upon these trivial points because it is important that
we should know exactly what Strauss's intentions were, for only with
a knowledge of them can we judge his symphony as a work of art. It
is quite clear then that he has thought it worth while to put about
a hundred people to a great deal of trouble and expense in order to
suggest the imbecile spectacle of a baby shrieking in its bath; and
I think it is time the world protested against so much of its leisure
and its funds being taken up with sheer inanities of this kind. In
Strauss's previous works there are at most only two or three passages
of realism at which I would shy; they have generally been saved for
us by some touch of beauty, or humour, or technical cleverness. But
the baby episodes in the _Symphonia domestica_ are too great a demand
on our indulgence, and one is bound to say that there is something
physically wrong with a brain that can fall so low as this. I hold him
to be a man of enormous gifts, a magician, a wonder-worker of the first
rank. But he can do nothing now on a large scale without deliberately
spoiling it at some point or other out of pure freakishness--a
freakishness that has ceased to be humour, and is merely the temporary
lapse into silliness of a very clever man.
It goes without saying that if there is this degeneration--temporary
or permanent--of the artistic sense that I suppose to be now going on
in Strauss, it will show in other departments; and I think it shows
pretty evidently in the music of the symphony as a whole. To my mind
there is not a memorable theme in it; neither the theme of the husband,
of the wife, nor of the child has anything like the quality that will
entitle it to rank with the pregnant melodies of Strauss's other work.
Think of the countless felicities of _Ein Heldenleben_, and you will
realise at once the comparative poverty of the _Symphonia domestica_.
Further, he is getting too fond of working upon mere snippets of
phrases, instead of the great soaring, sweeping melodies of his earlier
days; these tiny figures will of course go contrapuntally with almost
anything--which is probably one reason for his using them--but for
that same reason their perpetual chattering in the orchestra becomes
in the end rather tiresome. I am not denying, of course, that at times
the music rises to great heights; the scene of the parents playing
with the child is exquisitely beautiful; there are fine moments in the
love-music; and the fugue simply picks one up and carries one away, so
broad and healthy is its heartiness. There is again much of that old
technical mastery that makes slaves of us even where our soul revolts
against the actual message of the composer. But on the whole I do not
see how the new work can stand comparison with _Ein Heldenleben_ in any
way. It looks far more impressive on paper than it actually sounds;
it is grossly overscored, a good third of the notes being perfectly
superfluous, as anyone can discover for himself by following it with
the score. The mania is growing on Strauss for filling the music-paper
with something or other, it matters not what; he has a lust for ink;
it positively afflicts him to see an empty bar for any instrument.
Master of orchestration as he is, there is page after page in the
_Symphonia domestica_ containing the grossest of miscalculations; time
after time we can see what his intention has been and how completely
it has been frustrated by his own extravagance. He wants to wear all
the clothes in his wardrobe at once. The same tendency is noticeable
in his thematic work. When he has a good theme now he cannot leave it
alone; he must fumble and fuss all round it till he has blurred its
outline and stifled half its expression; the pleasant little lullaby,
for example, would have been three times as effective without that
jerky counterpoint against it in the oboe d'amore, bassoon, and viola,
which simply gives the impression that somebody or other is always
coming in at the wrong place, and quite disturbs the atmosphere of the
lullaby itself. Altogether I am inclined to think that the new work as
a whole shows a decided falling-off. And the reason? Well, is it not
very likely that there has at last happened what some of us prophesied
some two or three years ago? No artist can put so great a physical and
mental strain upon himself as Strauss does and still keep his brain
at its best. With all his many duties and occupations, his conducting
and his constant travelling, it is a wonder he has any strength left
to compose. For years he has been wearing his sensitive nervous system
down to the very edge; and I should not be surprised to find that in
doing so he has injured a good deal the delicacy of its tissue. It is
said that he lives the busy life he does in order to make enough money
to give up all public work and devote himself entirely to composition;
but before that time comes he will probably, if he is not careful,
have lost more of the divine fire than he can ever replace. The
_Symphonia domestica_ I take to be the work of an enormously clever man
who was once a genius.