In discussing Richard Strauss’ symphonic poem, Also Sprach Zarathustra,
its musical, technical, emotional and æsthetic significance must be
considered,--if I may be allowed this rather careless grouping of
categories. The work itself is fertile in arousing ideas of a widely
divergent sort. It is difficult to speak of it without drifting into
the dialectics of the Nietzsche school. It is as absolute music that
it should be critically weighed, and that leads into the somewhat
forbidding field of the nature of thematic material. Has Strauss, to
put it briefly, a right, a precedent to express himself in music in a
manner that sets at defiance the normal eight bar theme; that scorns
euphony; that follows the curve of the poem or drama or thesis he is
illustrating, just as Wagner followed the curve of his poetic text?
The question is a fascinating one and a dangerous one, fascinating
because of its complexity, and also because any argument that attempts
to define the limits of absolute music is an argument that is dangerous.
Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner, three heroes of poetic realism,
pushed realism to the verge of the ludicrous, according to their
contemporaries. Liszt was especially singled out as the champion of
making poems in music, making pictures in music, and giving no more
clue to their meaning than the title. Liszt’s three great disciples,
Saint-Saëns, Tschaïkowsky and Richard Strauss, have dared more than
their master. In Saint-Saëns we find a genial cleverness and a mastery
of the decorative and more superficial side of music--all this allied
to a charming fancy and great musicianship. Yet his stories deal only
with the external aspects of his subject. Omphale bids Hercules spin,
and the orchestra is straightway transformed into a huge wheel and
hums as the giant stoops over the distaff. Death dances with rattling
xylophonic bones; Phaeton circles about the Sun God, and we hear his
curved chariot and fervent pace. But the psychology is absent. We learn
little of the thoughts or feelings of these subjects, and indeed they
have none, being mere fabled abstractions clothed in the pictorial
counterpoint of the talented Frenchman.
In Tschaïkowsky, the lights are turned on more fiercely; his dramatic
characterization is marvellous when one considers that the human
element is absent from his mechanism. He employs only the orchestra,
and across its tonal tapestry there flit the impassioned figures of
Romeo and Juliet, the despairing apparition of Francesca da Rimini,
and the stalking of Hamlet and Manfred, gloomy, revengeful, imperious,
thinking and sorrowing men.
Tschaïkowsky went far, but Richard Strauss has dared to go further.
He first individualized, and rather grotesquely, Don Juan, Til
Eulenspiegel, Macbeth; but in Death and Apotheosis and in Also Sprach
Zarathustra he has attempted almost the impossible; he has attempted
the delineation of thought, not musical thought, but philosophical
ideas in tone. He has disclaimed this attempt, but the fact
nevertheless remains that the various divisions and subdivisions of
his extraordinary work are attempts to seize not only certain elusive
psychical states, but also to paint pure idea--the “Reine vernunft” of
the metaphysicians. Of course he has failed, yet his failure marks a
great step in the mastery over the indefiniteness of music. Strauss’
German brain with its grasp of the essentials of philosophy, allied
to a vigorous emotional nature and a will and imagination that stop
at nothing, enabled him to throw into high relief his excited mental
states. That these states took unusual melodic shapes, that there is
the suggestion of abnormality, was to be expected; for Strauss has made
a flight into a country in which it is almost madness to venture. He
has, on his own opinions and purely by the aid of a powerful reasoning
imagination, sought to give an emotional garb to pure abstractions.
Ugliness was bound to result but it is characteristic ugliness. There
is profound method in the madness of Strauss, and I beg his adverse
critics to pause and consider his aims before entirely condemning him.
The object of music is neither to preach nor to philosophize, but the
range of the art is vastly enlarged since the days of music of the
decorative pattern type. Beethoven filled it with his overshadowing
passion, and shall we say ethical philosophy? Schumann and the
romanticists gave it color, glow and bizarre passion; Wagner moulded
its forms into rare dramatic shapes, and Brahms has endeavored to fill
the old classic bottles with the new wine of the romantics. All these
men seemed to dare the impossible, according to their contemporaries,
and now Strauss has shifted the string one peg higher; not only does
he demand the fullest intensity of expression but he insists on the
presence of pure idea, and when we consider the abstract nature of
the first theme of Beethoven’s fifth symphony, when we recall the
passionate inflection of the opening measures of Tristan and Isolde,
who shall dare criticise Strauss, who shall say to him, Thus far and no
farther?
I
Richard Strauss said of his work when it was produced in Berlin,
December, 1896: “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. The whole symphonic poem
is intended as my homage to the genius of Nietzsche, which found its
greatest exemplification in his book, Thus Spake Zarathustra.”
For me the beginning is like Michel Angelo’s Last Judgment, or the
birth of a mighty planet; its close has the dreary quality of modern
art, profoundly sad and enigmatic. There is no God for Strauss, there
is no God in Tschaïkowsky’s last symphony and there was no God for
Nietzsche, no God but self.
You have Strauss’ point of view, have you not? He disclaims making any
attempt to set philosophy to tones; indeed Wagner’s failure in Tristan
and the Ring to ensnare Schopenhauer’s metaphysic was sufficient
warning for the younger man. The whole undertaking stands and falls
upon the question: Is Also Sprach Zarathustra good music? I set aside
now all considerations of orchestral technic--a technic that leaves
Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner gaping aghast in the rear--and propose only
the consideration of Strauss’ thematic workmanship. Let it be at once
conceded that he does not make beautiful music, that his melodies are
unmelodious, even ugly, when subjected to the classic or romantic
tests--call it classic and be done, for Schumann, Chopin, Liszt and
Wagner are classics--and we have now further narrowed the argument to a
question of the characteristic or veristic in melody making, and this
is the crux of the situation.
Has Richard Strauss, then, made characteristic music, and how has its
character conformed with his own dimly outlined programme--not Dr.
Riemann’s elaborate analytical scheme?
“I did not intend to write philosophical music,” he said. Of course
not; it were impossible; but some of the raw elements of philosophy are
in the poem; keen, overwhelming logic, sincerity, orbic centrality,
and hints of the microcosm and the macrocosm of music. Strauss set out
to accomplish what has never before been accomplished in or out of the
world, and he has failed, and the failure is glorious, so glorious that
it will blind a generation before its glory is apprehended; so glorious
that it blazes a new turn in the path made straight by Beethoven,
Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner!
Wagner sought the aid of other arts, and sang his Schopenhauer
in gloomy tones; Strauss, relying on the sheer audacity of the
instrumental army, chants of the cosmos, of the birth of atoms, of the
religious loves, hates, works, doubts, joys and sorrows of the atom,
would fain deluge us with an epitome of the world processes, and so
has failed. But what colossal daring! What an imagination! What poetic
invention!
The authors of Genesis, of the Book of Job, of the Songs of Solomon,
the Apocalypse, the Iliad, the Sermon on the Mount, the Koran, the
Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Shakespeare’s plays, Faust, the Ninth
Symphony and Tristan, all rolled into one would have failed too, before
such a stupendous task.
Now, perhaps we may reach a comparative estimate of the glory involved
in Richard Strauss’ half-mad, idealistic failure.
Putting aside Riemann as a hopelessly involved guide--a baleful
ignis-fatuus in a midnight forest,--Strauss’ poem impressed me,
after three hearings, as the gigantic torso of an art work for the
future. Euphony was hurled to the winds, the Addisonian ductility of
Mozart, the Théophile Gautier coloring of Schumann, Chopin’s delicate
romanticism, all were scorned as not being truthful enough for the
subject in hand, and the subject is not a pretty or a sentimental one.
Strauss, with his almost superhuman mastery of all schools, could
have written with ease in the manner of any of his predecessors, but,
like a new Empedocles on Ætna, preferred to leap into the dark, or
rather into the fiery crater of truth. In few bars did I discover an
accent of insincerity, a making of music for the mere sake of music.
He has leaped where Liszt feared to venture, and Strauss is Liszt’s
descendant as well as Wagner’s. He cast aside all makeshifts, even the
human voice, which is the human interest, and dared, with complicated
virtuosity, to tell the truth--_his_ truth, be it remembered--and so
there is little likelihood of his being understood in this century.
It were madness to search for Nietzsche in Strauss--that is, in this
score. It is un-Nietzsche music--Nietzsche who discarded Wagner for
Bizet, Beethoven for Mozart. Schopenhauer, it may be remembered,
laughed at Wagner the musician, played the flute and admired Rossini!
If Nietzsche, clothed in his most brilliant mind, had sat in the
Metropolitan Opera House of New York City on the occasion of the first
performance of his poem by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, December,
1897, he would probably have cried aloud: “I have pronounced laughter
holy,” and then laughed himself into the madhouse. Poor, unfortunate,
marvellous Nietzsche! But it is Strauss mirroring his own moods after
feeding full on Nietzsche, and we must be content to swallow his
title, “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” when in reality it is “Thus Spake
Richard Strauss!”
The first theme--Zarathustra’s, intoned by four trumpets--is solemnly
prodigious; probably the dwellers in the rear world theme meant
something to the composer. You see he has us on the hip; either accept
his symbols or not; you have your choice, you believers in programme
music; to me it was lugubriously shuddersome. I liked the beautiful
A flat melody; it was almost a melody, and the yearning motive was
tremendously exciting. In the section, Joys and Passions, the violins
and ’celli sweep in mountainous curves of passion--never except in
Wagner has this molten episode been equalled--and then the ground
began to slip under my feet. I grasped at the misty shadows of the
grave song, and the tortuous and wriggling five voice fugue in Science
seemed like some loathsome, footless worm. The dance chapter is shrilly
bacchanalian. It may be the Over-Man dancing, but no human ever trod on
such scarlet tones.
And the waltz melody! why, it is as common as mud, and intentionally
so, but it is treated with Promethean touches. When I reached the part
called the Song of the Night Wanderer, I renounced Bach, Beethoven
and Brahms and became maddeningly intoxicated--not with joy, but with
doubt, despair and defiance. Never shall I forget that screaming
trumpet as it cut jaggedly across the baleful gloom! Sinister beyond
compare was the atmosphere, and I could have cried aloud with Dante:
“Lo, this is Dis!”
I understood the divine laughter of Hell, and it surely was Dis that
held its sides and cackled infernally! When we had reached the rim of
eternity, “the under side of nothing,” as Daudet would have said, there
the “twelve strokes of the heavy, humming bell”:
ONE!
O Man, take heed!
TWO!
What speaks the deep midnight?
THREE!
I have slept, I have slept--
FOUR!
I have awaked out of a deep dream:--
FIVE!
The world is deep,
SIX!
And deeper than the day thought.
SEVEN!
Deep is its woe--
EIGHT!
Joy, deeper still than heart sorrow:
NINE!
Woe speaks: Vanish!
TEN!
Yet all joy wants eternity--
ELEVEN!
Wants deep, deep eternity!