[59] It is put down for a performance in London this spring.
[60] It is worth noting how Berlioz justified his own setting of some
passages in _Roméo et Juliette_ orchestrally instead of vocally. "If,"
he says, "in the celebrated scenes of the garden and the cemetery, the
dialogue of the two lovers, the _a parte_ of Juliet and the passionate
outbursts of Romeo are not vocalised, if, in short, the duets of
love and despair are confided to the orchestra, the reasons for this
are numerous and easy to grasp. First, because we are dealing with a
symphony, not with an opera. Secondly, duets of this nature having been
treated vocally a thousand times, and by the greatest masters, there
was both prudence and curiosity in trying another mode of expression.
It is, moreover, because the very sublimity of this love made the
painting of it so dangerous for the musician, that he had to give his
imagination a latitude which the positive connotations of chanted
words would not have permitted him, by resorting to the instrumental
language--a language richer, more varied, less restricted, and by its
very indefiniteness incomparably more powerful in cases of this kind."
[61] The reader will, of course, remember that I am here speaking only
of the _tissue_ of Strauss's work. In the intellectual part of it,
as I shall show later, he sometimes does things with the deliberate
intention of startling us. See Section IV. of this essay.
[62] Perhaps I ought to except such things as the passage in _Ein
Heldenleben_ (page 50 of the full score), where the strings and oboe
run up in sevenths, instead of the sixths we expect--an agonising thing
that always sounds as if somebody in the orchestra had made a mistake.
Either Strauss wrote it so out of pure devilment, with his tongue in
his cheek all the time, or it may answer to some subtle harmony in his
brain that ours are incompetent to grasp. There can be no doubt that
his ear must be vastly more acute than the normal organ. As Mr. James
Huneker puts it in a brilliant article in his _Overtones_: "His is the
most marvellous 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 over-tones, of scales that violate the
well-tempered, of tonalities that approximate to the quarter-tones of
Oriental music."
[63] In _Feuersnot_, it may be said, Strauss himself goes back for
a moment to something like that old world. But he does not take it
seriously; the quaint mediæval story is only a background against
which he can display his passion, his humour, his irony. Wagner would
have made a portentous thing of the _Feuersnot_ subject; he would have
discovered the profoundest philosophy and ethic in it. Strauss behaves
towards it like a graceless, irreverent urchin in a cathedral.