Strauss

Strauss was never the fine, the perfect artist. Even in the first flare

of youth, even at the time when he was the meteoric, dazzling figure

flaunting over all the baldpates of the universe the standard of the

musical future, it was apparent that there were serious flaws in his

spirit. Despite the audacity with which he realized his amazing and

poignant and ironic visions, despite his youthful fire and

exuberance--and it was as something of a golden youth of music that

Strauss burst upon the world--one sensed in him the not quite

beautifully deepened man, heard at moments a callow accent in his

eloquence, felt that an unmistakable alloy was fused with the generous

gold. The purity, the inwardness, the searchings of the heart, the

religious sentiment of beauty, present so unmistakably in the art of the

great men who had developed music, were wanting in his work. He had

neither the unswerving sense of style, nor the weightiness of touch,

that mark the perfect craftsman. He was not sufficiently a scrupulous

and exacting artist. It was apparent that he was careless, too easily

contented with some of his material, not always happy in his detail.

Mixed with his fire there was a sort of laziness and indifference. But,

in those days, Strauss was unmistakably the genius, the original and

bitingly expressive musician, the engineer of proud orchestral flights,

the outrider and bannerman of his art, and one forgave his shortcomings

because of the radiance of his figure, or remained only half-conscious

of them.

For, once his period of apprenticeship passed, and all desire to write

symphonies and chamber-music in the styles of Schumann and Mendelssohn

and Brahms, to construct operas after the pattern of "Tannhäuser" and

"Parsifal" gone out of him, this slender, sleepy young Bavarian with the

pale curly hair and mustaches had commenced to develop the expressive

power of music amazingly, to make the orchestra speak wonderfully as it

had never spoken before. Under his touch the symphony, that most rigid

and abstract and venerable of forms, was actually displaying some of the

novel's narrative and analytical power, its literalness and concreteness

of detail. It was describing the developments of a character, was

psychologizing as it had hitherto done only in conjunction with poetry

or the theater. Strauss made it represent the inflammations of the sex

illusion, comment upon Nietzsche and Cervantes, recount the adventures,

somersaults and end of a legendary rascal, portray a hero of our time.

He made all these intellectual concepts plastic in a music of a

brilliance and a sprightliness and mordancy that not overmany classic

symphonies can rival. Other and former composers, no doubt, had dreamt

of making the orchestra more concretely expressive, more precisely

narrative and descriptive. The "Pastoral" symphony is by no means the

first piece of deliberately, confessedly programmatic music. And before

Strauss, both Berlioz and Liszt had experimented with the narrative,

descriptive, analytical symphony. But it was only with Strauss that the

symphonic novel was finally realized.

Neither Berlioz nor Liszt had really embodied their programs in living

music. Liszt invariably sacrificed program to sanctioned musical form.

For all his radicalism, he was too trammeled by the classical concepts,

the traditional musical schemes and patterns to quite realize the

symphony based on an extra-musical scheme. His symphonic poems reveal

how difficult it was for him to make his music follow the curve of his

ideas. In "Die Ideale," for instance, for the sake of a conventional

close, he departed entirely from the curve of the poem of Schiller which

he was pretending to transmute. The variations in which he reproduced

Lamartine's verse are stereotyped enough. When was there a time when

composers did not deform their themes in amorous, rustic and warlike

variations? The relation between the pompous and somewhat empty "Lament

and Triumph" and the unique, the distinct thing that was the life of

Torquato Tasso is outward enough. And even "Mazeppa," in which Liszt's

virtuosic genius stood him in good stead, makes one feel as though

Liszt could never quite keep his eye on the fact, and finally became

engrossed in the weaving of a musical pattern fairly extraneous to his

idea. The "Faust Symphony" is, after all, an exception. Berlioz, too,

failed on the whole to achieve the musical novel. Whenever he did attain

musical form, it was generally at the expense of his program. Are the

somewhat picturesque episodes of "Harold in Italy," whatever their

virtues, and they are many, more than vaguely related to the Byronism

that ostensibly elemented them? The surprisingly conventional overture

to "King Lear" makes one feel as though Berlioz had sat through a

performance of one of Shakespeare's comedies under the impression that

he was assisting at the tragedy, so unrelated to its subject is the

music. And where, on the other hand, Berlioz did succeed in being

regardful of his program, as in the "Symphonic Fantastique," or in

"Lélio," there resulted a somewhat thin and formless music.

But Strauss, benefiting by the experiments of his two predecessors,

realized the new form better than any one before him had done. For he

possessed the special gifts necessary to the performance of the task. He

possessed, in the first place, a miraculous power of musical

characterization. Through the representative nicety of his themes,

through his inordinate capacity for thematic variation and

transformation, his playful and witty and colorful instrumentation,

Strauss was able to impart to his music a concreteness and

descriptiveness and realism hitherto unknown to symphonic art, to

characterize briefly, sparingly, justly, a personage, a situation, an

event. He could be pathetic, ironic, playful, mordant, musing, at will.

He was sure in his tone, was low-German in "Till Eulenspiegel," courtly

and brilliant in "Don Juan," noble and bitterly sarcastic in "Don

Quixote," childlike in "Tod und Verklärung." His orchestra was able to

accommodate itself to all the folds and curves of his elaborate

programs, to find equivalents for individual traits. It is not simply "a

man," or even "an amatory hero" that is portrayed in "Don Juan." It is

no vague symbol for the poet of the sort created by "Orpheus" or "Tasso"

or "Mazeppa." It is Lenau's hero himself, the particular being Don Juan

Tenorio. The vibrant, brilliant music of the up-surging, light-treading

strings, of the resonant, palpitating brass, springs forth in virile

march, reveals the man himself, his physical glamour, his intoxication

that caused him to see in every woman the Venus, and that in the end

made him the victim as well as the hero of the sexual life. It is Till

Eulenspiegel himself, the scurvy, comic rascal, the eternal dirty little

boy with his witty and obscene gestures, who leers out of every measure

of the tone-poem named for him, and twirls his fingers at his nose's end

at all the decorous and respectable world. Here, for once, orchestral

music is really wonderfully rascally and impudent, horns gleeful and

windy and insolent, wood-wind puckish and obscene. Here a musical form

reels hilariously and cuts capers and dances on bald heads. The

variation of "Don Quixote" that describes with wood-wind and tambourine

Dulcinea del Toboso is plump and plebeian and good-natured with her very

person, is all the more trenchantly vulgar and flat for the preceding

suave variation that describes the knight's fair, sonorous dream of her.

There is no music more plaintively stupid than that which in the same

work figures the "sheep" against which Don Quixote battles so valiantly.

Nor is there any music more maliciously, malevolently petty than that

which represents the adversaries in "Ein Heldenleben." So exceedingly

definite is the portrait of the Hero's Consort, for which Frau Richard

Strauss, without doubt, sat, that without even having seen a photograph

of the lady, one can aver that she is graced with a diatonic figure.

And, certainly the most amusing passage of "Sinfonia Domestica" is that

complex of Bavarian lustihood, Bavarian grossness, Bavarian dreaminess

and Bavarian good nature, the thematic group that serves as autoportrait

of the composer.

And just as there seemed few characters that Strauss could not paint, in

those days, so, too, there seemed few situations, few atmospheres, to

which he could not do justice. A couple of measures, the sinister

palpitation of the timpani and the violas, the brooding of the

wood-wind, the dull flickering of the flutes, the laboring breath of the

strings, and we are lying on the death-bed, exhausted and gasping for

air, weighed by the wrecks of hopes, awaiting the cruel blows on the

heart that will end everything. Horns and violins quaver and snarl,

flutes shrill, a brief figure descends in the oboes and clarinets, and

Till has shed his rascal-sweat and danced on the air. The orchestra

reveals us Don Juan's love affairs in all their individuality: first the

passionate, fiery relation with the Countess, quickly begun and quickly

ended; then the gentler and more inward communion with Anna, with the

boredom resulting from the lady's continual demand for sentiment and

romantic posturing; then the great night of love and roses, with its

intoxicated golden winding horns, its ecstatically singing violins; and

finally the crushing disappointment, the shudder of disgust. The battle

in "Ein Heldenleben" pictures war really; the whistling, ironical

wind-machine in "Don Quixote" satirizes dreams bitingly as no music has

done; the orchestra describes the enthusiastic Don recovering from his

madness, and smiles a conclusion; in "Also Sprach Zarathustra" it piles

high the tomes of science, and waltzes with the Superman in distant

worlds.

And then, though less fecund an inventor than Liszt, less rich and large

a temperament than Berlioz, Strauss was better able than either of his

masters to organize his material on difficult and original lines, and

find musical forms representative of his programs. Because of their

labors, he was born freer of the classical traditions than they had

been, and was able to make music plot more exactly the curves of his

concepts, to submit the older forms, such as the rondo and the theme and

variations, more perfectly to his purpose. Compositions of the sort of

"Till Eulenspiegel," "Tod und Verklärung" and "Ein Heldenleben," solidly

made and yet both narrative and dramatic, place the symphonic poem in

the category of legitimate musical forms. The themes of "Till" grow out

of each other quite as do the themes of a Beethoven symphony or of

"Tristan" or of "Parsifal." Indeed, Strauss has done for the symphonic

poem something of what Wagner did for the opera. And not an overwhelming

number of classical symphonies contain music more eloquent than, say,

the "sunrise" in "Also Sprach Zarathustra," or the final variation of

"Don Quixote" with its piercing, shattering trumpets of defeat, or the

terrifying opening passage of "Tod und Verklärung." For Strauss was able

to unloose his verve and fantasy completely in the construction of his

edifices. His orchestra moves in strangest and most unconventional

curves, shoots with the violence of an exploding firearm, ambles like a

palfrey, swoops like a bird. There are few who, at a first hearing of a

Strauss poem, do not feel as though some wild and troubling and panic

presence had leaned over the concert hall and bedeviled the orchestra.

For, in his hands, it is no longer the familiar and terrorless thing it

once had been, a thing about whose behavior one can be certain. It has

become a formidable engine of steel and gold, vibrant with mad and

unexpected things. Patterns leap and tumble out of it. Violin music

launches swiftly into space, trumpets run scales, the tempi move with

the velocity of express trains. It has become a giant, terrible bird,

the great auk of music, that seizes you in its talons and spirals into

the empyrean.

But it was what he seemed to promise to perform, to bring into being,

even more than what he had already definitely accomplished, that spread

about the figure of Strauss the peculiar radiance. It was Nietzsche who

had made current the dream of a new music, a music that should be

fiercely and beautifully animal, full of laughter, of the dry good light

of the intellect, of "salt and fire and the great, compelling logic, of

the light feet of the south, the dance of the stars, the quivering

dayshine of the Mediterranean." The other composers, the Beethovens and

Brahms and Wagners, had been sad, suffering, wounded men, men who had

lost their divine innocence and joy in the shambles, and whose spiritual

bodies were scarred, for all the muscular strength gained during their

fights, by hunger and frustration and agony. Pain had even marred their

song. For what should have been innocence and effortless movement and

godlike joy, Mozartean coordination and harmony, was full of terrible

cries, and convulsive, rending motions, and shrouding sorrow. And

Nietzsche had dreamt of music of another sort. He had dreamt of a music

that should be a bridge to the Superman, the man whose every motion

would be carefree. He had seen striding across mountain chains in the

bright air of an eternal morning a youth irradiant with unbroken energy,

before whom all the world lay open in vernal sunshine like a domain

before its lord. He had seen one beside whom the other musicians would

stand as convicts from Siberian prison camps who had stumbled upon a

banquet of the gods. He had seen a young Titan of music, drunken with

life and fire and joy, dancing and reeling and laughing on the top of

the world, and with fingers amid the stars, sending suns and

constellations crashing. He had caught sight of the old and eternally

youthful figure of Indian Dionysos.

And even though Strauss himself could scarcely be mistaken for the god,

nevertheless he made Nietzsche's dream appear realizable. He permitted

one for an instant to perceive a musical realm in which the earth-fast

could not breathe. He permitted one for an instant to hear ringing "the

prelude of a deeper, mightier, perchance a more evil and mysterious

music; a super-German music which does not fade, wither and die away

beside the blue and wanton sea and the clear Mediterranean sky; a music

super-European, which would assert itself even amid the tawny sunsets of

the desert; a music whose soul is akin to the palm-trees; a music that

can consort and prowl with great, beautiful, lonely beasts of prey; a

music whose supreme charm is its ignorance of Good and Evil." For he

came with some of the light and careless and arrogant tread, the

intellectual sparkling, the superb gesture and port, of the musician of

the new race. The man who composed such music, one knew, had been born

on some sort of human height, in some cooler, brighter atmosphere than

that of the crowded valleys. For in this music there beat a faster

pulse, moved a lighter, fierier, prouder body, sounded a more ironic and

disdainful laughter, breathed a rarer air than had beat and moved and

sounded and breathed in music. It made drunken with pleasant sound, with

full rich harmonies, with exuberant dance and waltz movements. It seemed

to adumbrate the arrival of a new sort of men, men of saner, sounder,

more athletic souls and more robust and cool intelligences, a generation

that was vitally satisfied, was less torn and belabored by the

inexpressible longings of the romantic world, a generation very much at

home on the globe. For it had none of the restless, sick desire of

Wagner, none of his excessive pathos, his heaviness and stiff grandeur.

It had come down off its buskins, was more easy, witty, diverting,

exciting, popular and yet cerebral. Though it was obviously the speech

of a complicated, modern man, self-conscious, sophisticated, nervous,

product of a society perhaps not quite as free and Nietzschean as it

deemed itself, but yet cultivated and illuminated and refined, it

nevertheless seemed exuberantly sound. The sweet, broad, diatonic idiom,

the humor, the sleepy Bavarian accent, the pert, naïve, little

folk-tunes it employed, the tranquil, touching, childlike tones, the

close of "Tod und Verklärung," with its wondrous unfolding of corolla

upon corolla, were refreshing indeed after all the burning chromaticism

of Wagner, the sultry air of Klingsor's wonder-garden.

And this music glittered with the sun. The pitch of Wagner's orchestra

had, after all, been predominantly sober and subdued. But in the

orchestra of Strauss, the color-gamut of the _plein-air_ painters got a

musical equivalent. Those high and brilliant tints, these shimmering,

biting tones, make one feel as though Strauss made music with the

paint-brush of a Monet or a Van Gogh. His trumpets are high and

brilliant and silvery, his violins scintillant and electric, at moments

winding a lazy, happy, smoke-blue thread through the sunburnt fabric of

the score. His horns glow with soft, fruity timbres. The new sweetness

of color which he attains in his songs, the pale gold of "Morgen," the

rose of the Serenade, the mild evening blue of "Traum durch die

Dämmerung," shimmers throughout his orchestra scores. Never have wind

instruments sounded more richly, dulcetly, than in that "Serenade für

dreizehn Bläser." At a first hearing of "Also Sprach Zarathustra," it

seemed as though the very dayspring had descended into the orchestra to

make that famous, brassy opening passage. For here, in the hand of

Strauss, the orchestra begins to round out its form and assume its

logical shape. The various families of instruments are made independent;

often play separately. The shattering brass of which Berlioz had dreamt

is realized. Violas d'amore, hecklephones, wind-machines, are introduced

into the band; the familiar instruments are used in unfamiliar

registers. Through the tone-poems of Strauss, the orchestral composer

for the first time has a suitable palette, and can achieve a brilliance

as great as that which the modern painter can attain.

To-day, it is difficult to realize that Richard Strauss ever incensed

such high hopes, that there was a time when he made appear realizable

Nietzsche's mad dream of a modern music, and that for awhile the nimbus

of Dionysos burnt round his figure. To-day it is difficult to remember

that once upon a time Strauss seemed to the world the golden youth of

music, the engineer of proud orchestral flights, the outrider and

bannerman of his art. For it is long since he has promised to reveal the

new beauty, the new rhythm, has seemed the wonderful start and flight

toward some rarer plane of existence, some bluer ether, the friend of

everything intrepid and living and young, the "arrow of longing for the

Superman." It is a long while since any gracious, lordly light has

irradiated his person. In recent years he has become almost the very

reverse of what he was, of what he gave so brave an earnest of becoming.

He who was once so electric, so vital, so brilliant a figure has become

dreary and outward and stupid, even. He who once seemed the champion of

the new has come to fill us with the weariness of the struggle, with

deep self-distrust and discouragement, has become a heavy and oppressive

weight. He who once sought to express the world about him, to be the

poet of the coming time, now seems inspired only by a desire to do the

amazing, the surface thing, and plies himself to every ephemeral and

shallow current of modern life. For Strauss has not only not deepened

and matured and increased in stature; he has not even stood still,

remained the artist that once he was. He has progressively and steadily

deteriorated during the last decade. He has become a bad musician. He is

the cruel, the great disappointment of modern music, of modern art. The

dream-light has failed altogether, has made the succeeding darkness the

thicker for the momentary illumination. Strauss to-day is seen as a

rocket that sizzled up into the sky with many-colored blaze, and then

broke suddenly and extinguished swiftly into the midnight.

It is not easy, even for those who were aware from the very first that

Strauss was not the spirit "pardlike, beautiful and swift" and that

there always were distinctly gross and insensitive particles in him, to

recognize in the slack and listless person who concocts "Joseph's

Legende" and the "Alpensymphonie," the young and fiery composer, genius

despite all the impurities of his style, who composed "Till

Eulenspiegel" and "Don Quixote"; not easy, even though the contours of

his idiom have not radically altered, and though in the sleepy facile

periods of his later style one catches sight at times of the broad,

simple diction of his earlier. For the later Strauss lacks pre-eminently

and signally just the traits that made of the earlier so brilliant and

engaging a figure. Behind the works of the earlier Strauss there was

visible an intensely fierily experiencing being, a man who had powerful

and poignant and beautiful sensations, and the gift of expressing them

richly. Behind the work of the latter there is all too apparent a man

who for a long while has felt nothing beautiful or strong or full, who

no longer possesses the power of feeling anything at all, and is

inwardly wasted and dull and spent. The one had a burning and wonderful

pressure of speech. The other seems unable to concentrate energy and

interest sufficiently to create a hard and living piece of work. The

one seemed to blaze new pathways through the brain. The other steps

languidly in roadways well worn. He is not even amusing any longer. The

contriver of wonderful orchestral machines, the man who penetrated into

the death-chamber and stood under the gibbet, has turned to toying with

his medium, to imitating other composers, Mozart in "Der Rosenkavalier,"

Haendel in "Joseph's Legende," Offenbach and Lully (a coupling that only

Strauss has the lack of taste to bring about) in "Ariadne auf Naxos." He

has become increasingly facile and unoriginal, has taken to quoting

unblushingly Mendelssohn, Tchaikowsky, Wagner, himself, even. His

insensitivity has waxed inordinately, and led him to mix styles, to

commingle dramatic and coloratura passages, to jumble the idioms of

three centuries in a single work, to play all manner of pointless pranks

with his art. His literary taste has grown increasingly uncertain. He

who was once so careful in his choice of lyrics, and recognized the

talents of such modern German poets as Birnbaum and Dehmel and Mackay,

accepts librettos as dull and inartistic and precious as those with

which Hofmannsthal is supplying him, and lends his art to the boring

buffooneries of "Der Rosenkavalier" and "Ariadne auf Naxos." Something

in him has bent and been fouled.

One thing at least the Strauss of the tone-poems indisputably was. He

was freely, dazzlingly, daringly expressive. And this is what the

Strauss of the last years thinly and rarely is. It is not Oscar Wilde's

wax flowers of speech, nor the excessively stiff and conventionalized

action of "Salome," that bores one with the Strauss opera of that name.

It is not even the libretto of "Der Rosenkavalier," essentially coarse

and boorish and insensitive as it is beneath all its powdered

preciosity, that wearies one with Strauss's "Musical Comedy"; or the

hybrid, lame, tasteless form of "Ariadne auf Naxos" that turns one

against that little monstrosity. It is the generally inexpressive and

insufficient music in which Strauss has vested them. The music of

"Salome," for instance, is not even commensurable with Wilde's drama. It

was the evacuation of an obsessive desire, the revulsion from a pitiless

sensuality that the poet had intended to procure through this

representation. But Strauss's music, save in such exceptional passages

as the shimmering, restless, nerve-sick opening page, or the beginning

of the scene with the head, or certain other crimson patches, hampers

and even negates the intended effect. It emasculates the drama with its

pervasive prettiness, its lazy felicitousness where it ought to be

monstrous and terrifying, its reminiscences of Mendelssohn, Tchaikowsky

and "Little Egypt." The lascivious and hieratic dance, the dance of the

seven veils, is represented by a _valse lente_. Oftentimes the score

verges perilously on circus-music, recalls the sideshows at county

fairs. No doubt, in so doing it weakens the odor exuded by Wilde's play.

But if we must have an operatic "Salome," it is but reasonable to demand

that the composer in his music express the sexual cruelty and frenzy

symbolized in the figure of the dancer. And the Salome of Strauss's

score is as little the Salome of Wilde as she is the Salome of Flaubert

or Beardsley or Moreau or Huysmans. One cannot help feeling her

eminently a buxom, opulent Berliner, the wife, say, of the proprietor of

a large department store; a heavy lady a good deal less "dämonisch" and

"perverse" than she would like to have it appear. But there are moments

when one feels as though Strauss's heroine were not even a Berliner, or

of the upper middle class. There are moments when she is plainly Käthi,

the waitress at the Münchner Hofbraühaus. And though she declares to

Jokanaan that "it is his mouth of which she is enamored," she delivers

the words in her own true-hearted, unaffected brogue.

Nor is "Elektra," more sharp than "Salome," though it oftentimes is, the

musical equivalent for the massive and violent forms of archaic Greek

sculpture that Strauss intended it be. Elektra herself is perhaps more

truly incarnate fury than Salome is incarnate luxury; ugliness and

demoniacal brooding, madness and cruelty are here more sheerly

powerfully expressed than in the earlier score; the scene of

recognition between brother and sister is more large and touching than

anything in "Salome"; Elektra's paean and dance, for all its closeness

to a banal _cantilena_, its _tempo di valse_ so characteristic of the

later Strauss, is perhaps more grandiosely and balefully triumphant than

the dancer's scene with the head. Nevertheless, the work is by no means

realized. It is formally impure, a thing that none of the earlier

tone-poems are. Neither style nor shape are deeply felt. Both are

superficially and externally conceived; and nothing so conclusively

demonstrates it as the extreme ineffectually of the moments of contrast

with which Strauss has attempted to relieve the dominant mood of his

work. Just as in "Salome" the more restless and sensual passages, lazily

felt as they are, are nevertheless infinitely more significant than the

intensely contrasting silly music assigned to the Prophet, so, too, in

"Elektra," the moments when Strauss is cruel, brutal, ugly are of a much

higher expressiveness than those in which he has sought to write

beautifully. For whereas in moments of the first sort the lions of the

Mycenæ gates do at times snarl and glower, in those of the second it is

the Teutonic beer-mug that makes itself felt. Elektra laments her father

in a very pretty and undistinguished melody, and entreats her sister to

slay Klytemnæstra to the accompaniment of a sort of _valse perverse_. It

is also in _tempo di valse_ that Chrysothemis declares her need of

wifehood and motherhood. As an organism the work does not exist.

But even the expressiveness and considerability of "Salome" and

"Elektra," limited and unsatisfactory as they are, are wanting in the

more recent works. With "Der Rosenkavalier," Strauss seems to have

reached a condition in which it is impossible for him to penetrate a

subject deeply. No doubt he always was spotty, even though in his golden

days he invariably fixed the inner informing binding rhythm of each of

his works. But his last works are not only spotty, but completely

spineless as well, invertebrate masses upon which a few jewels, a few

fine patches, gleam dully. "Salome" and "Elektra" had at least a certain

dignity, a certain bearing. "Der Rosenkavalier," "Ariadne auf Naxos,"

"Joseph's Legende" and "Eine Alpensymphonie" are makeshift, slack,

slovenly despite all technical virtuosity, all orchestral marvels. Every

one knows what the score of "Rosenkavalier" should have been, a gay,

florid, licentious thing, the very image of the gallant century with its

mundane amours and ribbons and cupids, its _petit-maîtres_ and furbelows

and _billets-doux_, its light emotions and equally light surrenders. But

Strauss's music is singularly flat and hollow and dun, joyless and

soggy, even though it is dotted with waltzes and contains the delightful

introduction to the third act, and the brilliant trio. It has all the

worst faults of the libretto. Hofmannsthal's "comedy for music," though

gross and vulgar in spirit, and unoriginal in design, is full of a sort

of clever preciosity, full of piquant details culled from

eighteenth-century prints and memoirs. The scene of the coiffing is a

print of Hogarth's translated to the stage; Rofrano's name "Octavian

Maria Ehrenreich Bonaventura Fernand Hyazinth" is like an essay on the

culture of the Vienna of Canaletto; the polite jargon of

eighteenth-century aristocratic Austria spoken by the characters, with

its stiff, courteous forms and intermingled French, must have been

studied from old journals and gazettes. And Strauss's score is equally

precious, equally a thing of erudition and cleverness. Mozart turned the

imbecilities of Schickaneder to his uses; Weber triumphed over the

ridiculous romancings of Helmine von Chezy. But Strauss follows

Hofmannsthal helplessly, soddenly. Just as Hofmannsthal imitates

Hogarth, so Strauss imitates Mozart, affects his style, his turns, his

spirit; inserts a syrupy air in the style of Haendel or Méhul in the

first act; and jumbles Mozart with modern comic-opera waltzes, Haendel

with post-Wagnerian incantations. And like Hofmannsthal's libretto, the

score remains a superficial and formless thing. The inner and coherent

rhythm, the spiritual beat and swing, the great unity and direction, are

wanting. "I have always wanted to write an opera like Mozart's, and now

I have done it," Strauss is reported to have said after the first

performance of "Der Rosenkavalier." But "Der Rosenkavalier" is almost

antipodal to "Don Giovanni" or to "Falstaff" or to "Die Meistersinger"

or to any of the great comic operas. For it lacks just the thing the

others possess abundantly, a strong lyrical movement, a warm emotion

that informs the music bar after bar, scene after scene, act after act,

and imparts to the auditor the joy, the vitality, the beauty of which

the composers' hearts were full. It is a long while since Strauss has

felt anything of the sort.

Had the new time produced no musical art, had no Debussy nor Scriabine,

no Strawinsky nor Bloch, put in appearance, one might possibly have

found oneself compelled to believe the mournful decadence of Richard

Strauss the inevitable development awaiting musical genius in the modern

world. There exists a group, international in composition, which, above

all other contemporary bodies, arrogates to itself the style of

modernity. It is the group, tendrils of which reach into every great

capital and center, into every artistic movement and cause, of the bored

ones, the spoilt ones. The present system has lifted into a _quasi_

aristocratic and leisurely state vast numbers of people without

background, without tradition or culture or taste. By reason of its

largeness and resources, this group of people without taste, without

interest, without finesse, has come to dominate in particular the world

of art as the world of play, has come to demand distraction, sensation,

excitement which its unreal existence does not afford it. Indeed, this

band has come to give a cast to the whole of present-day life; its

members pretend to represent present-day culture. It is with this group

with its frayed sensibilities and tired pulses that Strauss has become

increasingly identified, till of late he has become something like its

court-musician, supplying it with stimulants, awaking its curiosities,

astonishing and exciting it with the superficial novelty of his works,

trying to procure it the experiences it is so lamentably unable to

procure itself. It is for it that he created the trumpery horrors, the

sweet erotics of the score of "Salome." It is for it that he imitated

Mozart saccharinely in "Der Rosenkavalier"; mangled Molière's comedy;

committed the vulgarities and hypocrisies of "Joseph's Legende." And did

no evidence roundly to the contrary exist, one might suppose this group

to really represent modern life; that its modernity was the only true

one; and that in expressing it, in conforming to it, Strauss was

functioning in the only manner granted the contemporary composer. But

since such evidence exists aplenty, since a dozen other musicians, to

speak only of the practitioners of a single art, have managed to keep

themselves immune and yet create beauty about them, to remain on the

plane upon which Strauss began life, to persevere in the direction in

which he was originally set, and yet live fully, one finds oneself

convinced that the deterioration of Strauss, which has made him musical

purveyor to this group, has not been the result of the pressure of

outward and hostile circumstances. One finds oneself positively

convinced that it was some inner weakness within himself that permitted

the spoilt and ugly folk to seduce him from his road, and use him for

their purposes.

And in the end it is as the victim of a psychic deterioration that one

is forced to regard this unfortunate man. The thing that one sees

happening to so many people about one, the extinction of a flame, the

withering of a blossom, the dulling and coarsening of the sensibilities,

the decay of the mental energies, seems to have happened to him, too.

And since it happens in the lives of so many folk, why should it

surprise one to see it happening in the life of an artist, and

deflowering genius and ruining musical art? All the hectic, unreal

activity of the later Strauss, the dissipation of forces, points back to

such a cause. He declares himself in every action the type who can no

longer gather his energies to the performance of an honest piece of

work, who can no longer achieve direct, full, living expression, who can

no longer penetrate the center of a subject, an idea. He is the type of

man unfaithful to himself in some fundamental relation, unfaithful to

himself throughout his deeds. Many people have thought a love of money

the cause of Strauss's decay; that for the sake of gain he has

delivered himself bound hand and foot into the power of his publishers,

and for the sake of gain turned out bad music. No doubt, the love of

money plays an inordinate rôle in the man's life, and keeps on playing a

greater and greater. But it is probable that Strauss's desire for

incessant gain is a sort of perversion, a mania that has gotten control

over him because his energies are inwardly prevented from taking their

logical course, and creating works of art. Luxury-loving as he is,

Strauss has probably never needed money sorely. Some money he

doubtlessly inherited through his mother, the daughter of the Munich

beer-brewer Pschorr; his works have always fetched large prices--his

publishers have paid him as much as a thousand dollars for a single

song; and he has always been able to earn great sums by conducting. No

matter how lofty and severe his art might have become, he would always

have been able to live as he chose. There is no doubt that he would have

earned quite as much money with "Salome" and "Der Rosenkavalier" had

they been works of high, artistic merit as he has earned with them in

their present condition. The truth is that he has rationalized his

unwillingness to go through the labor-pains of creation by pretending to

himself a constant and great need of money, and permitting himself to

dissipate his energies in a hectic, disturbed, shallow existence, in a

tremor of concert-tours, guest-conductorships, money-making enterprises

of all sorts, which leave him about two or three of the summer months

for composition, and probably rob him of his best energies. So works

leave his writing table half-conceived, half-executed. The score of

"Elektra" he permits his publishers to snatch from him before he is

quite finished with it. He commences composing "Der Rosenkavalier"

before having even seen the third act. The third act arrives; Strauss

finds it miserable. But it is too late. The work is half-finished, and

Strauss has to go through with it. Composition becomes more and more a

mechanical thing, the brilliant orchestration of sloppy, undistinguished

music, the polishing up of details, the play of superficial cleverness

which makes a score like "Der Rosenkavalier," feeble as it is,

interesting to many musicians.

And Richard Strauss, the one living musician who could with greatest

ease settle down to uninterrupted composition, gets to his writing table

in his apartment in Charlottenburg every evening at nine o'clock, that

is, whenever he is not on duty at the Berlin Opera.

And always the excuses: "Earning money for the support of wife and child

is not shameful," "I am going to accumulate a large enough fortune so

that I can give up conducting entirely and spend all my time composing."

But one can be sure that when Strauss soliloquizes, it is a different

defense that he makes. One can be sure, then, that he justifies himself

cynically, bitterly, grossly, tells himself that the game is not worth

the candle, that greatness is a matter of advertisement, that only the

values of the commercial world exist, that other success than the

procurement of applause and wealth and notoriety constitutes failure.

Why should you take the trouble to write good work that will bring you

posthumous fame when without trouble you can write work that will bring

you fame during your lifetime? The whole world is sham and advertisement

and opportunism, is it not? Reputations are made by publishers and

newspapers. Greatness is a matter determined by majorities. But impress

the public, but compose works that will arouse universal comment, but

break a few academic formulas and get yourself talked about, but write

music that will surprise and seem wonderful at a first hearing, and your

fame is assured. The important thing is to live luxuriously and keep

your name before the public. In so doing one will have lived life as

fully as it can be lived. And after one is dead, what does it all

matter?

Yet, though the world be full of men whose spiritual energies have been

lamed in kindred fashions, the terrible misadventure of Richard Strauss

remains deeply affecting. However far the millions of bright spirits who

have died a living death have fallen, their fall has been no farther

than this man's. There can be no doubt of the completeness of Strauss's

disaster. It is a long while since he has been much besides a bore to

his once fervent admirers, an object of hatred to thousands of honest,

idealistic musicians. He has completely, in his fifty-sixth year, lost

the position of leadership, of eminence that once he had. Even before

the war his operas held the stage only with difficulty. And it is

possible that he will outlive his fame. One wonders whether he is not

one of the men whose inflated reputations the war has pricked, and that

a world will shortly wonder, before his two new operas, how it was

possible that it should have been held at all by the man. Had he been

the most idealistic, the most uncompromising of musicians he could not

be less respected. Perhaps his last chance lay in the "Alpensymphonie."

Here was a ceremony that could have made him priest once again. Europe

had reached a summit, humanity had had a vision. Before it lay a long

descent, a cloudburst, the sunset of a civilization, another night.

Could Strauss have once more girded himself, once more summoned the

faith, the energy, the fire that created those first grand pages that

won a world to him, he might have been saved. But it was impossible.

Something in him was dead forever. And so, to us, who should have been

his champions, his audiences, his work already seems old, part of the

past even at its best, unreal except for a few of the fine symphonic

works. To us, who once thought to see in him the man of the new time,

he seems only the brave, sonorous trumpet-call that heralded a king who

never put in his appearance, the glare that in the East lights the sky

for an instant and seems to promise a new day, but extinguishes again.

He is indeed the false dawn of modern music.