Where is Hell-Breughel, painter, or Kapellmeister Kreisler, composer,
after this weltering symphony of sin, sorrow and cruel passions? Their
symbolism seems crude and childish, although Hoffman’s musician was
certainly a forerunner of Strauss.
There is one thing I cannot understand. If the Wagnerians and the
Lisztianer threw overboard old forms in obedience to their masters, why
can they not accept the logical outcome of their theories in Strauss?
If you pitch form to the devil, there must be a devil to pitch it to.
Strauss is the most modern of the devils, and to the old classical
group he would be the reductio ad absurdum of the movement that began
with Beethoven. Do you hear? Beethoven! To assert that his shoulders
are not broad enough to wear the mantle of Liszt, I can only ask why?
Liszt seems jejune when it comes to covering an orchestral canvas of
the size of Strauss’s. Strauss is his natural musical son, and the
son has quite as much to say thematically as the father, while in
the matter of brush brilliancy, massing of color, startling figure
drawing--witness Don Juan and Til Eulenspiegel--and swift thinking,
Strauss is easily the superior. He has not Wagner’s genius; far from
it; yet, as Otto Floersheim said: “Also Sprach Zarathustra” is “the
greatest score penned by man.” It is a cathedral in architectonic and
is dangerously sublime, dangerously silly, with grotesque gargoyles,
hideous flying abutments, exquisite traceries, fantastic arches half
gothic, half infernal, huge and resounding spaces, gorgeous façades
and heaven splitting spires. A mighty structure, and no more to be
understood at one, two or a dozen visits than the Kölner Dom.
It lacks only simplicity of style; it is tropical, torrential, and
in it there is the note of hysteria. It is complex with the diseased
complexity of the age, and its strivings are the agonized strivings of
a morbid Titan. Truthful? aye, horribly so, for it shows us the brain
of a great man, overwrought by the vast emotional problems of his
generation.
Also Sprach Zarathustra should be played once every season, and the
audience be limited to poets, musicians and madmen. The latter, being
Over-Men, would grasp its sad truths. And as I write I hear the key
of B major and the key of C major and those three cryptic sinister Cs
pizzicato at the close, and ask myself if, after all, Nietzsche and
Strauss are not right, “Eternity’s sought by all delight--eternity
deep--by all delight.”