Musically it is a symphonic poem of rather loose construction and as
to outline; but rigorously logical in its presentment of thematic
material, and in its magnificent weaving of the contrapuntal web. There
is organic unity, and the strenuousness of the composer’s ideas almost
blind his hearers to their tenuity, and sometimes a squat ugliness.
Strauss has confessed to not following a definite scheme, a precise
presentation of the bacchantic philosophy of Nietzsche. Nietzsche was
a lyrical rhapsodist, a literary artist first, perhaps a philosopher
afterward. It is the lyric side of him that Strauss seeks to interpret.
Simply as absolute music it is astounding enough--astounding in its
scope, handling and execution. It is not as realistic as you imagine,
not as realistic for instance as the Don Juan and Til Eulenspiegel.
Strauss is here an idealist striving after the impossible, yet
compassing the hem of grandeur, and often a conscious seeker after
the abnormally ugly. Yet one hesitates to call his an abnormally evil
brain. Abnormal it may be in its manifestation of eccentric power but
it is not evil in its tendency, and a brain that can rear such a mighty
tone structure is to be seriously dealt with.
As a mere matter of musical politics I do not care for programme music.
Wagner and, before him, Beethoven, fixed its boundaries. Liszt, in his
Faust symphony, and Wagner, in his Faust overture, read into pure music
as much meaning as its framework could endure without calling in the
aid of the sister arts. Strauss pushed realism to a frantic degree,
giving us in his Death and Apotheosis the most minute memoranda. But
in Also Sprach Zarathustra he has deserted surface imitations. The
laughter of the convalescent, and the slow, creeping fugue betray his
old tendencies. There is an uplifting roar in the opening that is
really elemental. Those tremendous chords alone proclaim Strauss a
man of genius, and their naked simplicity gives him fee simple to the
heritage of Beethoven. But this grandeur is not maintained throughout.
The close is enigmatic, and the juggling with the tonality is fruitful
of suspense, bewilderment. Yet it does not plunge the listener into the
gloomy, abysmal gulf of Tschaïkowsky’s last movement of the B minor
symphony. It is not so simple nor yet so cosmical. Strauss has the
grand manner at times, but he cannot maintain it as did Brahms in his
Requiem, or Tschaïkowsky in his last symphonic work.
The narrative and declamatory style is often violently interrupted by
passages of great descriptive power; the development of the themes
seems coincidental with some programme in Strauss’ mind and the
contrapuntal ingenuity displayed is just short of the miraculous. There
is a groaning and a travailing spirit, a restless, uneasy aspiring
which is Faust-like, and suggests a close study of Eine Faust Overture,
but there is more versatility of mood, more hysteria and more febrile
agitation in the Strauss score. It is a sheaf of moods bound together
with rare skill, and in the most cacophonous portions there is no
suspicion of writing for the exposition of wilful eccentricity. There
are reminiscences more in color than form of Tristan, of Walküre, Die
Meistersinger, and once there was a suggestion of Gounod, but the
composer’s style is his own despite his Wagnerian affiliations.
Strauss is a man of rare and powerful imagination; the tentacles of his
imagination are restlessly feeling and thrusting forward and grappling
with material on most dangerous territory. The need of expression
of definite modes of thought, of more definite modes of emotion, is
a question that has perplexed every great composer. With such an
apparatus as the modern orchestra--in Strauss’s hands an eloquent,
plastic and palpitating instrument--much may be ventured and, while the
composer has not altogether succeeded--it is almost a superhuman task
he sets himself to achieve--he has made us think seriously of a new
trend in the art of discoursing music. Formalism is abandoned--Strauss
moves by episodes; now furiously swift, now ponderously lethargic, and
one is lost in amazement at the loftiness, the solidity and general
massiveness of his structure. The man’s scholarship is so profound,
almost as profound as Brahms’; his genius for the orchestra so marked,
his color and rhythmic sense so magnificently developed that the
general effect of his rhetoric is perhaps too blazingly brilliant. He
has more to say than Berlioz and says it better, is less magniloquent
and more poetical than Liszt, is as clever as Saint-Saëns, but in
thematic invention he is miles behind Wagner.
His melodies, it must be confessed, are not always remarkable or
distinguished in quality, setting aside the question of ugliness
altogether. But the melodic curve is big and passional. Strauss can be
tender, dramatic, bizarre, poetic and humorous, but the noble art of
simplicity he sadly lacks--for art it is. His themes in this poem are
often simple; indeed the waltz is distinctly commonplace, but it is
not the Doric, the bald simplicity of Beethoven. It is rather a brutal
plainness of speech.
Strauss is too deadly in earnest to trifle or to condescend to ear
tickling devices. The tremendous sincerity of the work will be its
saving salt for many who violently disagree with the whole scheme. The
work is scored for one piccoli-flute, three flutes (the third of which
is interchangeable with a second piccolo), three oboes, one English
horn, one E flat clarinet, two ordinary clarinets, one bass clarinet,
three bassoons, one double bassoon, six horns, four trumpets, three
trombones, two bass tubas, one pair of kettledrums, bass drum, cymbals,
triangle, Glockenspiel, one low bell, two harps, the usual strings, and
organ.