Strauss

“ It is in the harmonic rather than the melodic field that the fancy of Strauss soars the freest. It is here that his music bears an individual stamp of beauty. Playing in and out among the edges of the main harmony with a multitude of ornamental phrases, he gains a new shimmer of brilliancy. Aside from instrumental coloring, where he seems to outshine all others in dazzling richness and startling contrasts, he adds to the lustre by a deft playing in the overtones of his harmonies, casting the whole in warmest hue. ”

“ Even in those days the great Strauss had made his name as well known as that of the father of our country. He it was who knew each morning whether the rains had fallen on the plains beneath the Andes; how many cattle on the hoof had entered the gates of Omaha and Kansas City; how tight the pinch of starvation set upon Russian bellies; and whether the Sultan's subjects had bought their bread of Liverpool. Flesh and grain, meat and bread—Strauss held them in his hand, and he dealt them forth in the markets of the world! ”

“ The music of Strauss plunges us at once into this whirl of intoxicating gaiety. A series of love-episodes ensue, each one [124] being individualised with amazing subtlety. It is, of course, no new thing for masculine and feminine elements to be clearly distinguishable in music; but the wealth of resource that Strauss shows in these dialogues of dalliance and passion amounts to originality of a very remarkable kind. After several such episodes we have a section symbolising a masked ball that is very strongly stamped with the composer's genius as a musical humourist. ”

“ This is the manner, not the matter of the Strauss music. How far can this master magician, this royal juggler with [Pg 133] resolutions and suspensions, this acrobat of the flying chord, go with his endeavor to make music say for him the things that the entire decadent literature of modern Europe has striven to put down in plain words? If Strauss means anything, he means that Beethoven and Schumann were but the avant couriers of a vast march of progress into the bowels of delineation, the vitals of psychic communication. ”

“ Strauss is cosmic in his understanding and his sympathies, but not as men like Goethe and Leonardo are, whose vision is always clear, and whose energies are always held in check by another energy higher than themselves; like Rabelais, like Hokusai, like Goya, there come to him moments when the flood of life within him overflows, and he is hardly master of the strange shapes that issue from his brain. ”

“ 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 [Pg 158] activity of the man, for his ambitions, his marvellous command of every musical form, above all, for his skill as a colourist. ”

“ It really is a most amusing spectacle to watch Strauss as a metaphysical architect, building castles in the air. But for whose benefit is this entertainment given? For the smug and noble "We," that they may not lose conceit with themselves: they may possibly have taken sudden fright, in the midst of the inflexible and pitiless wheel-works of the world-machine, and are tremulously imploring their leader to come to their aid. That is why Strauss pours forth the "soothing oil," that is why he leads forth on a leash a God whose passion it is to err ”

“ Strauss's tone poem in about thirty minutes. A benefactor of mankind indeed is this philanthropist, who has not sought to write philosophical music. He has invented for us a kind of sugar-coated knowledge tablet. Abolish dry books and listen to the tone poems of Richard Strauss, and you will have the wisdom of the ages poured into your ears by trumpets and trombones.
And yet how refreshing to the spirit it is to hear after a Strauss tone preachment some such work of pure feeling as Schumann's Spring symphony! Here is no fugued fuddle of the fulminations of science. ”

“ You will find in the earlier Strauss abundant traces of Mozart, of Haydn, of Beethoven, of Wagner, of Schumann, of Brahms, of Liszt. Yet the curious thing is that nowhere do we feel that Strauss has been, even for a little time, wholly under the influence of any one of these; he is always himself, though he unaccountably lapses at times into the most distinct reminiscences of the manner of other men. ”

“ Every instrument in the Strauss orchestra is an actor that speaks its lines solo or during an amazing polyphony. After Don Quixote one need not be told that Strauss is not a mere Tintoretto of the orchestra; he is, I am not loath to repeat, both painter and psychologist. As the greatest narrator in modern prose is Gustave Flaubert, so Richard Strauss is the greatest of musical narrators. ”

“ 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. ”

“ These tremendous chords in their naked simplicity alone proclaim Strauss a man of genius and give him fee simple to the symphonic heritage of Beethoven and Brahms. The A flat section is notably melodious and luscious in color. The five-voiced fugue is ugly yet masterful, and the dance music furious in its abandonment, corybantic in its revelry. Such laughter has never been heard in an orchestra. The melodic curve is passional. Strauss is here tender, dramatic, bizarre, [Pg 46] poetic, humorous, ironic, witty, wicked—simple never. The noble art of simplicity he lacks. ”

“ By means of these examples I may succeed in showing what it is that inspires, in the hearts of modern Germans, such faith in this great and seductive stylist Strauss: I refer to his eccentricities of expression, which, in the barren waste and dryness of his whole book, jump out at one, not perhaps as pleasant but as painfully stimulating, surprises. When perusing such passages, we are at least assured, to use a Straussian metaphor, that we are not quite dead, but still respond to the test of a stab. ”

“ An Oriental potentate riding his horse contemptuously over the prostrate bodies of a half-adoring, half-resentful populace, is the only image that will justly describe him in his forceful, irresistible career. The gods have indeed smiled on Strauss. Much of his success, or of his power to command success, may no doubt be due to financial causes; he has never had to fight the world with an empty purse and empty stomach. ”

“ Therein Strauss may be said to mock his own idealism, as Heine and Nietzsche once mocked theirs. The realism is after all a realism of fantasy; for the narrative deals with what the Knight of the Rueful Countenance imagined and with what his trusty squire thought of him. With his characteristic flair for an apt subject, Strauss recognized in the semi-dream-life of Don Quixote a theme pat for treatment—and how he has treated it! That magnificent gift of irony, inherent in every sentence he utters, here expands in a soil worthy of it. ”

“ When one thinks of the tremendous influence which Strauss has had, and of the way in which he has altered the musical conceptions of the world, one can only wonder, astounded, why, in an encyclopædia as lengthy as the Britannica, he should be dismissed with so inadequate and inept a biography. ”

“ Strauss is the stormy petrel of modern music, and 'Salome' has aroused more discussion than anything he has written. Many critics quite the reverse of prudish have found its ethics somewhat difficult of digestion, while conservative musicians hold up their hands in horror at its harmonic audacity. The more advanced spirits find a strange exotic beauty in the weird harmonies and infinitely suggestive orchestration, and contend with some justice that a work of art must be judged as such, not as an essay in didactic morality. ”

“ No man is perhaps a hero to his valet; but Strauss is evidently a hero to himself. He is autobiographical in this tone poem, as in his Domestic symphony. There is a certain presumption in asking one to hear musical descriptions of a composer’s struggles, his feelings at being adversely criticized by wretched Philistines, who do not appreciate him, his sulking and withdrawal, like Achilles to his tent. And why drag Frau Strauss into the musical story and typify her, capricious, coquettish, by whimsical measures for the violin? ”

“ It is impossible to escape the compelling magnetism of the man from Munich. He is still young, still in his storm and stress period. When the time for clarification comes, Strauss in this final analysis will emerge a very big man. His Hero’s Life has its ugly spots—critics [Pg 52] and criticism are objectified in a cruelly sardonic fashion—and that battlefield will remain for this generation either sheer brutal noise or else the forefront of the higher æstheticism in music. One way or the other it matters little; the reputation of Strauss will not stand or fall by this poem. ”

“ The titanic achievements of Richard Strauss have caused him to appear as the most conspicuous living musician, and in the arrangement of a modern program, his works are at present the accepted companions to those of his models in rich and massive orchestration, Wagner and Liszt; to those of Brahms, conservator of classic models and loftiest ideals; to Saint-Saëns' scintillating and unrivalled tableaux; to Tschaikowsky's sombre tone-pictures, to Dvořák's brilliant and vivacious portrayals, to Grieg's poetic and popular conceptions. ”

“ 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! ”

“ Only those whom Strauss designates as his "We," speak as he does, and then, when they expatiate upon their faith to us, they bore us even more than when they relate their dreams; be they "scholars, artists, military men, civil employes, merchants, or landed proprietors; come they in their thousands, and not the worst people in the land either!" If they do not wish to remain the peaceful ones in town or county, but threaten to wax noisy, then let not the din of their unisono deceive us concerning the poverty and vulgarity of the melody they sing. ”

“ Strauss has his full share of the temerity to which every successful hero assumes the right: all flowers grow only for him—the conqueror; and he praises the sun because it shines in at his window just at the right time. He does not even spare the venerable old universe in his eulogies—as though it were only now and henceforward sufficiently sanctified by praise to revolve around the central monad David Strauss. ”

“ Liszt seems jejune when it comes to covering an [Pg 153] 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.” ”

“ His Don Juan and Macbeth are romantic in style, and for that reason are praised by those who fear to desert old milestones and wander in the tangled, fulminating forests of his later music. With the story of the mediæval German rogue, Till Eulenspiegel, Strauss unleashes his fantasy. It is a scherzo in form—how he burlesques the form and its very idea! The color scheme is daring, oppressively high, and at times we near the cosmic screech. All is prankishness, darting fancy, consuming irony. The humor is both rarefied and Teutonically clumsy. ”

“ We have here to deal with the latest phase of Strauss, and to arrive at anything like a true estimate of "Heldenleben" we have to remember that Strauss is a reformer and the recognised leader of a party which, whether we like it or not, has played and is playing a great part in the world of music. ”

“ Strauss has never surpassed the plangency of coloring, the melting sweetness of this score. He is more philosophic in Also sprach Zarathustra, more dramatic in Don Juan, more heroic in Ein Heldenleben; but never has his message been so consoling, never has he set so vividly over his orchestra the arc of promise. That such music came forth from his potent youth is a prophecy of an astounding future. He is the only living issue in music to-day; no other master has his stride, his stature. ”