I
After a week of Richard Strauss at Stuttgart one begins to entertain a
profound respect for the originality of Richard Wagner. And Wagner
during his embattled career was liberally accused of plagiarism, of
drawing heavy drafts upon the musical banking houses of Beethoven,
Weber, Marschner, Schubert, and how many others! Indeed, one of the
prime requisites of success for a composer is to be called a borrower
of other men's ideas. The truth is that there are only thirty-six
dramatic situations and only seven notes in the scale, and all the
possible permutations will not prevent certain figures, melodic
groups, or musical moods from recurrence. Therefore, to say that
Richard Strauss is a deliberate imitator of Wagner would be to restate
a very common exaggeration. He is inconceivable without Wagner;
nevertheless, he is individual. All his musical life he has been
dodging Wagner and sometimes he succeeds in whipping his devil so far
around the stump that he becomes himself, the glorious Richard
Strauss of Don Quixote, of Till Eulenspiegel, of Hero's Life, and
Elektra. But it may be confessed without much fear of contradiction
that for him Wagner is his model--even in Salome, where the head of
John the Baptist is chanted to the tune of Donner's motive from
Rheingold.
At the Stuttgart festival, in 1912, which endured a week, I was struck
by the Wagner obsession in the music of his only legitimate successor.
To alter an old quotation, we may say: He who steals my ideas steals
trash: ideas are as cheap and plentiful as potatoes in season; but he
who steals my style takes from me the only true thing I possess. Now,
Richard Strauss in addition to being a master of form, rather of all
musical forms, is also the master-colourist of the orchestra. No one,
not even Wagner, o'ertops him in this respect, though Wagner and
Berlioz and Liszt showed him the way. Why, then, does he lean so
heavily on Wagner, not alone on his themes--for Strauss is, above all,
a melodist--but on his moods; in a word, the Wagnerian atmosphere? I
noted that wherever a situation analogous to one in the Wagnerian
music-drama presented itself the music of the protean younger Richard
was coloured by memories of the elder composer. For example, in
Ariadne at Naxos, the heroine is discovered outstretched on her island
in the very abandonment of despair. We hear faint echoes of the last
pages of Tristan and Isolde; no sooner do three women begin to sing
than is conjured up a vision (aural, of course) of the Rhine maidens.
In Feuersnot the legendary tone was unavoidable, yet there is too much
of Die Meistersinger in this early work. Does a duenna appear with the
heroine, at once you are reminded of Eva and Magdalena; and in the
balcony scene, so different in situation from Lohengrin, Elsa
nevertheless peers from behind the figure of Diemut. As for the
lovers, Kunrad and Diemut, they, taking advantage of the darkness, as
Mr. Henderson once remarked of another opera, Azrael, appropriated the
musical colour--let me put the case mildly--of the duo of Walther and
Eva. Wagner dead remains the imperious tyrant, a case of musical
mortmain, the lawyers would put it; a hand reaching from his grave
dictating the doings of the living. The great chorus in Feuersnot,
after the fires are extinguished, because of the Alberich-like curse
of Kunrad, is not without suggestions from the street fight in Die
Meistersinger, and the wild wailings of the Walkyrie brood. Thus, if
you are looking for reminiscences, I know of few composers whose work,
vast and varied as it is, will afford such chances of spearing a
Wagner motive as it appears for a moment on the swift and boiling
stream of the Strauss orchestral narration. But if you have attained
the age of discretion you will not ask too much, forget such childish
and sinister play, and enjoy to the full the man's extraordinary gift
of music-making.
For Richard Strauss is an extraordinary musician. To begin with, he
doesn't look like a disorderly genius with rumpled hair, but is the
mildest-mannered man who ever scuttled another's score and smoked
Munich cigars or played "skat." And then he loves money! What
other composer, besides Handel, Haydn, Mozart--yes, and also
Beethoven--Gluck, Meyerbeer, Verdi, Puccini, so doted on the
box-office? Why shouldn't he? Why should he enrich the haughty music
publisher or the still haughtier intendant of the opera-house? As a
matter of fact, if R. Strauss were in such a hurry to grow rich, he
would write music of a more popular character. It would seem, then,
that he is a millionaire malgre lui, and that, no matter what he
writes, money flows into his coffers. Indeed, an extraordinary man.
Despite his spiritual dependence upon Wagner, and in his Tone-Poems,
upon Liszt and Berlioz, he has a very definite musical personality. He
has amplified, intensified the Liszt-Wagner music, adding to its
stature, also exaggerating it on the purely sensuous side. That he can
do what no other composer has done is proved by the score of his
latest opera Ariadne at Naxos, given for the first time in Stuttgart.
Here, with only thirty-six in the orchestra, a grand pianoforte and a
harmonium included, he produces the most ear-ravishing tones, thus
giving a negative to those who assert that without a gigantic
orchestral apparatus he is ineffectual. Strauss received a sound
musical education; he could handle the old symphonic form, absolute
music, before he began writing in the vein modern; his evolution has
been orderly and consistent. He looked before he leaped. His songs
prove him to be a melodist, the most original since Brahms in this
form. Otherwise, originality is conditioned. He is, for instance, not
as original as Claude Debussy, who has actually said something new.
Strauss, a rhetorician with enormous temperamental power, modifies the
symphonic form of Liszt, boils down the Wagnerian trilogy into an hour
and thirty minutes of seething, white-hot passion, and paints all the
moods, human and inhuman, with incomparable virtuosity. It is a
question of manner rather than matter. He is even a greater virtuoso
than Hector Berlioz, and infinitely more tender; he is Meyerbeer in
his opportunism, but there the comparison may be dropped, for old
Meyerbeer could shake tunes out of his sleeve with more facility than
does Strauss--and that is saying a lot. No, the style of Strauss is
his own, notwithstanding his borrowings from Liszt and Wagner. He is
not as original as either one, for he employs them both as his point
of departure; but when you begin to measure up the power, the scope,
and the versatility of his productions you are filled with a wholesale
admiration for the almost incredible activity of the man, for his
ambitions, his marvellous command of every musical form, above all,
for his skill as a colourist.
Sometimes he hits it and sometimes he doesn't. After two hearings of
Ariadne at Naxos in the smaller of the two new royal opera-houses at
Stuttgart, I came to the conclusion that both composer and librettist,
while greatly daring, had attempted the impossible, and therefore
their work, despite its many excellencies, missed fire. In the first
place, Herr Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the poet of Elektra and Der
Rosercavalier, conceived the unhappy idea that Moliere's Le Bourgeois
Gentilhomme might be butchered to make a Straussian holiday and serve
merely as a portico for the one-act opera that follows. But the
portico turned out to be too large for the operatic structure. The
dovetailing of play and music is at best a perilous proceeding. Every
composer knows that. To give two acts of spoken Moliere (ye gods! and
spoken in German) with occasional interludes of music, and then top it
off with a mixture of opera seria and commedia del arte, is to invite
a catastrophe. To be sure, the unfailing tact of Strauss in his
setting of certain episodes of the Moliere play averted a smash-up,
but not boredom. In the second place, the rather heavy fooling of the
actors, excellent artists all, made Moliere as dull as a London fog.
The piece is over two hundred and fifty years old; it must be played
by French actors, therefore in the German version sadly suffers. I
hear that it has been still further cut down, and at the present
writing there is some gossip to the effect that Ariadne will be sung
some day without the truncated version of Moliere by the ingenious
Herr Hofmannsthal.