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$Title{Richard Strauss
Chapter III: Later Instrumental Works - Part I}
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$Author{Newman, Ernest}
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$Subject{music
form
musical
poetic
first
strauss
work
ideas
programme
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$Date{1908}
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Title:       Richard Strauss
Author:      Newman, Ernest
Date:        1908

Chapter III: Later Instrumental Works - Part I

     Aus Italien (1886), in which Strauss made his first cautious step away
from the older abstract to the more modern poetic forms, was, according to
tradition, largely influenced by the teaching of Alexander Ritter.  But we
need not attribute too much to this influence; no doubt much of its strength
came from the fact that it operated upon Strauss just when his musical
imagination was losing some of its first metallic hardness and softening into
something more purely emotional.  We have already noted signs of this here and
there in the later work of his first period, notably in the Piano Quartet.
There seems, in fact, to have been a psychological change going on within him
at this time, which probably had its origin in some subtle physiological
change - some inteneration of the mental and bodily tissues that brought with
it a more nervous susceptibility to feeling.  The journey to Italy in the
spring of 1886 no doubt accelerated this process; Italy disturbed and inspired
the young man's imagination as it has always done that of sensitive
Northerners - Goethe, Tchaikovski, and Hugo Wolf, for example - when they have
visited it for the first time.  In Aus Italien, which was written immediately
after his return from the south, the pulse of Strauss's music is perceptibly
quickened and the temperature of it heightened by the physical and mental
sensations he had experienced in Italy ^* - more potent influences in his
development, we may be sure, than all the arguments of Ritter.  The emotional
glow in the first and third movements is as far above anything we meet with
even in the andante of the Piano Quartet as the warmth of that is above the
average temperature of the preceding works.  A casual survey of the first
movement alone will show that here everything is generated and controlled by
emotion.  There is no music-making for music-making's sake, no mere strenuous
turning of the wheel regardless of whether there is any corn being ground or
not, as there was in much of the earlier vigorous but steely work; here the
whole movement has its genesis in a personal emotion that has been sincerely
felt and lived through.  The music, too, has the broad deliberate onward sweep
from its beginning to its end that is characteristic of so many of the later
symphonic poems of Strauss; and although the composer here has wisely let the
ideas determine the form, instead of attempting to fit them into a
preconceived frame, the development is perfectly logical and the movement as a
whole finely balanced and organic.  In the third movement, again, depicting
the feelings of the composer "By Sorrento's Strand," there is a sensitiveness
to pure beauty - to the quality in music that gives the ear the same deep
contented joy that the form and colour of beautiful flowers give to the eye -
that marks a great advance upon anything of the kind that Strauss had
attempted previously.  Both this and the first movement, indeed, remain to
this day among his most truly felt and exquisitely expressed works.  We
notice, again, in this third movement, the beginning of Strauss's many efforts
at literary and pictorial characterization in music - though as yet the
tendency is kept within legitimate bounds.  The second movement is both
thematically and emotionally interesting and is well worked out.  The finale,
a representation of Neapolitan popular life, ^* is the least satisfactory
movement of the work.  There is a breezy vitality in a good deal of it, but as
a whole it does not hang together, the music often bustling along in a way
that is meant to be vivacious but is merely fussy.

[Footnote *: Strauss is still peculiarly susceptible to sunlight.  He has told
more than one friend that he cannot compose in the winter; light and warmth
are necessary before his ideas will begin to flow.]

[Footnote *: The first subject of the finale is the melody of Denza's song
"Funiculi, funicula," which Strauss had heard in Naples.  He thought it was a
Neapolitan folksong and has so designated it in his score]

     How much of the new warmth of feeling and the more vitalized workmanship
that marked Aus Italien out from the earlier music of Strauss was the outcome
of his having a poetic scheme to follow may be guessed from the Violin Sonata
composed in the following year.  Here, although at times the greater depth of
emotion and the superior technique that Strauss had now acquired are clearly
evident, he is obviously not completely at his ease in the more abstract
sonata form.  The first movement is indeed remarkably rich, strong, and well
constructed; the themes are both striking in themselves and are treated with
much fertility of device, and the music flows on in an almost unbroken current
from the first bar to the last.  But the andante, though there is a certain
artificial charm in some of the writing, notably in the arabesques of the
latter portion, has nothing like the depth of meaning of either of the slow
sections of Aus Italien.  To use a Coleridgian distinction, it comes from the
fancy rather than from the imagination; it is graceful and pleasant, but the
feeling is slightly self-conscious and rises from no great depth.  The finale
is almost wholly in Strauss's earlier manner - is, indeed, rather more
scrambling and inorganic than most of his youthful finales.  The Sonata marks
Strauss's final breach with the abstract classical form; he now recognized
that what he had to say was ill-fitted for this form, and that it could only
come to full expression in the freer forms of poetic music.

     This is not the place to attempt either a summary of the history of
programme music or a detailed analysis of the aesthetic problems it involves.
^* A brief survey of the question is, however, necessary if we desire to apply
a critical criterion to the later works of Strauss or to understand their
significance in the history of modern music.

[Footnote *: The student who is interested in the subject will find a mass of
historical information in Professor Niecks's recent large book, "Programme
Music." For an attempt to solve the general aesthetic question perhaps I may
be allowed to refer to a lengthy essay of my own in my "Musical Studies"
(1905).]

     Roughly speaking, there are two kinds of musical idea; the one is
self-existent and self-sufficient, referring to nothing external to itself,
and requiring no knowledge of anything but itself for the full understanding
of it; the other is prompted by some previous literary or pictorial concept
and can only be fully understood in conjunction with this.  At the one extreme
stand musical ideas like those of the average fugue, or the "subjects" of a
Mozart symphony; at the other extreme stand ideas like those of a song or an
opera.  Midway between these two there lies a peculiar kind of musical idea
that is not actually associated with words - as in the opera or the song - but
which, though it exists only in a purely instrumental form, really owes its
being to the desire to represent in music some other idea non-musical in its
origin.  Types of this kind of musical idea are seen in the tumultuous string
passages near the end of the "Leonora No. 3" overture, which symbolize the
over-whelming joy of Leonora and Florestan at the happy ending to their
sufferings; in the anguish-stricken opening phrases of Gluck's "Iphigenia in
Aulis" overture, which express the grief of Agamemnon; in the two melodies -
one stern and forceful, the other gentle and suppliant - that denote
respectively Coriolanus and the women in Beethoven's "Coriolanus" overture; in
the delicate flitting phrases that depict the fairies or the braying phrase
that depicts the ass in Mendelssohn's "Midsummer Night's Dream" overture; in
the thoughtful, mournful theme which, in Wagner's "Faust" overture, portrays
the old weary philosopher of Goethe's poem; in the phrases that suggest the
flowing water in the introduction to "The Rhine-gold"; in the phrases that
suggest the whirring of the spinning-wheels in "The Flying Dutchman"; in the
rhythms that suggest the galloping horse in Liszt's "Mazeppa"; in the softly
swaying harmonies that depict the rustling leaves in the "Waldweben" in
"Siegfried"; in the undulating melodies in which Bach often tries to suggest a
river, or the broken phrases in which he tries to convey the idea of a man
stumbling.  We may conveniently call the first kind of music abstract and the
second poetic, though we must always remember that a great deal of music that
is ostensibly abstract is really poetic in its origin.  There are many
apparently abstract compositions which, like the "Revolutionary" Etude of
Chopin, we know to have originated in a definite external stimulus; and there
must be a great many others which, though the composer has left us wholly
without clue to their poetic intention, are certainly translations into tone
of the impressions made by some book, or picture, or event, or aspect of
nature.  Probably, if the truth were known, two-thirds of the music of the
past two hundred years belong rather to the category of poetic than to that of
abstract music.

     So far, however, we have been considering only the basic ideas of a piece
of music.  These do not in themselves, of course, constitute a musical
composition, but only the material out of which it is to be made; and it is in
this process of building fragments of musical material into a large and
organic whole that the great point of contention arises between the abstract
and the poetic musicians.  We are face to face, in fact, with the great and
eternal problem of form - the problem of making each bar of a composition lead
so naturally and logically into the next that the whole tissue seems like a
living organism, and of so balancing one part with another, and making each
detail a necessary factor in the total effect, that the composition as a whole
satisfies our sense of design as a perfect piece of architecture does.
Composers have always instinctively striven after this architectural balance
and proportion; even the simplest song or dance shows it in its modulation,
half-way through, into the key of the dominant and its return to the key of
the tonic.  In the development of modern musical form it was inevitable that
for some time the composers should concentrate most of their attention on what
we may call the more external aspect of "design" in music - on securing an
obvious and rather artificial balance, proportion, and orderliness.  We see
the effect of this in the conventional key-schemes and the sharply separated
"subjects" of the average eighteenth-century symphony or sonata.  Men were
voyaging on new seas and felt it unsafe to venture out of sight of land; they
invented subjects so pointedly different in style that no one could help
perceiving where one ended and the other began; and their simple schemes of
key-contrast and key-sequence threw no strain on a sense of tonality that was
as yet almost in its infancy.

     The obvious lacunae in the symphonic structure of Mozart and Haydn were
filled up by Beethoven.  He made each part of the music grow organically out
of and into the parts that followed and preceded it; he introduced a wealth of
new detail - melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, and modulatory - yet built it all so
firmly and logically together that the total effect is as of some great
building of the utmost harmony of design, in which practically every stone
that is used plays an indispensable part.  In every sphere of music the same
ideal of form has to be striven after - logical continuity of tissue and
perfect balance between the details and the mass.

     But it is evident that abstract music can as a rule attain this ideal
much more easily than poetic music.  Music that is concerned with nothing but
self-existent themes and their possibilities of metamorphosis has necessarily
fewer difficulties in its way than poetic music, which has to pursue
simultaneously two lines of development; for it has to weave a connected
musical tissue by the same process of evolution of new matter from old that
goes on in abstract music, and at the same time it has to follow the lines
laid down for it by its poetic basis.  It is in the attempt to serve these two
masters at once that so much poetic music comes to grief; if the music pursues
merely its own line of development it is apt to obscure or misinterpret the
programme; ^* while if the programme is followed with too canine a fidelity
the total design of the work is likely to be imperfect - for literary form is
not musical form.  The early nineteenth-century experimenters in poetic music
were soon made to realize their dilemma.  Berlioz never succeeded in
discovering the new form that would fit his new ideas.  Liszt came nearer to
the ideal in his symphonic poems, in which the poetic scheme was made to
unfold within the frame of a single movement, instead of the three or four or
five movements of the classical symphony and the programme symphony of
Berlioz.  But Liszt's powers of construction were not equal to his powers of
invention.  He could illustrate the details of a poetic subject expressively
enough; but almost all his symphonic poems are weak in musical architecture.
He never succeeded in striking the proper balance between the claims of the
poetic scheme and the claims of the musical tissue to develop in its own way;
and in his anxiety that nothing of his programme shall remain unrevealed he
often writes music that is a mere disorganized drifting from one literary
point to another.  He is a musical illustrator rather than a musical builder.

[Footnote *: I here use the term "programme" to cover every kind and every
form of subject that music may attempt to express.  In this sense the poem of
a song or an opera is its "programme." Every student knows that there can be
the same clashing between the words and the music of a song, for example, as
between the programme and the music of a symphonic poem.  On the one hand
Liszt, in his symphonic poems, often pursues the literary idea at the expense
of the purely musical development; on the other hand Schubert often writes
pure music that does violent injustice to the poem it is supposed to
illustrate.]

     Poetic music, then, was for a long time in a dilemma.  The method of
Liszt and his more adventurous followers produced symphonic poems that were
often admirably veracious in detail, but ill-knit and incoherent as a whole;
the timid neo-classicists, on the other hand, merely gave literary titles to
pieces written in the conventional symphonic form.  Yet the way out of the
difficulty was perfectly plain.  Since poetic music has to tell a story and at
the same time to talk sound musical sense - for the ear will not tolerate, in
the name of literature, what it feels to be musical nonsense - obviously the
proper course is to choose a programme the development of which will assist
the purely musical evolution instead of placing obstacles in the way of it.
The musical tissue must always be the paramount consideration.  The poetic
scheme to be illustrated should therefore, in the first place, be as concise
and uncomplicated as possible, for, as music requires a large space for its
own peculiar kind of development, no more than a hint from poetry is needed to
start a lengthy musical discourse.  Secondly, since much of what we call
"development" in music consists of the re-presentation of the same thematic
material in different forms - the ear finding one of its greatest pleasures in
the recognition of variety in unity and unity in variety - it follows that the
later episodes in the poetic scheme should bear such a relation to the earlier
ones as can be logically expressed by metamorphoses of the earlier musical
themes.  The prelude to "Lohengrin" is so perfect because its underlying
poetic idea - the angel hosts emerging from the distance, bearing the Grail
nearer and nearer the spectator until its radiance blinds him, and then slowly
receding into the distance again - is one that lends itself admirably to a
typical musical device - that of starting a theme in the simplest terms,
working up the possibilities latent in it to a huge climax, and then refining
it away again to vanishing point.  Here, of course, there is practically no
incident; and it is when the composer of poetic music comes to work upon a
scheme that involves much incident that he realizes the difficulty of making
his poetic and his musical development run on the same lines.  It is this
difficulty that Strauss has come nearer solving than any other composer of
symphonic poems, partly because he has mostly been judicious in the selection
of his poetic material, partly because of the extraordinary fertility of
resource he has shown in the construction of the musical tissue of his work.

     For Strauss is in reality one of the great musical builders.  When
belated partisans of the older schools call his music "formless" they simply
mean that he builds in forms that transcend their own unprogressive conception
of the meaning of the word.  To them "form" means nothing more than sonata
form; the notion that there can be logic, unity, organic life in a composition
put together on any lines but these is inconceivable to them.  At bottom,
indeed, the question is one not so much of form as of idea.  All the music of
the giants of the past expresses no more than a fragment of what music can and
some day will express.  With each new generation it must discover and reveal
some new secret of the universe and of man's heart; and as the thing to be
uttered varies, the way of uttering it must vary also.  There is only one
rational definition of good "form" in music - that which expresses most
succinctly and most perfectly the state of soul in which the idea originated;
and as moods and ideas change, so must forms.  The form of the finale of the
"Pathetic Symphony," for example, is perfect, because in no other way could
that particular sequence of emotions be so poignantly and convincingly
expressed.  As Mr. Bernard Shaw has recently pointed out, ^* nothing more
perfect in the way of "form" could be imagined than the Preludes to
"Lohengrin" and "Tristan"; their evolution from the first bar to the last is
as inevitable in itself and as beautifully rounded and complete as the slow
passing of the hours in the cycle from dawn to dawn.  But for some musicians,
as has already been pointed out, "form" means sonata form and nothing more;
and they would crush all musical ideas into this frame as Procrustes forced
all his unhappy captives to fit the same bed.  Quite recently a London
newspaper solemnly censured a new work in these terms: "The whole work is
singularly lacking in contrapuntal interest, and depends solely for such
effect as it achieves upon certain emotional impressions of harmony and
colour." ^* It matters little to these good souls that the particular thing
the composer wanted to say could only be said as he chose to say it, and that
a display of counterpoint in the work might have been as ludicrously
ineffective as a suit of medieval armour on a modern fencer.  The only musical
interest, for some worthy people, is contrapuntal interest; and if a composer
has ideas that do not call for contrapuntal jugglery - well, so much the worse
for him.  If a Whistler gets "certain emotional impressions of harmony and
colour" from the play of a certain light on a fog-bank he must not try to
convey his impressions to others and to make them see the beauty he saw in
this vague vibration of colour; he must paint us something tangible and
substantial - a "Derby Day," for example, or a provincial Mayor in an
aggressively red robe.  Any new treatment of a new emotion must be shunned
like the plague; the thing to be aimed at is "contrapuntal interest."

[Footnote *: In "The Sanity of Art: an Exposure of the Current Nonsense about
Artists being Degenerate."]

[Footnote *: I cull the quotation from Mr. William Wallace's recent book "The
Threshold of Music," p 98.]

     The wild charge of "formlessness" that is so often flung at Strauss
comes, in fact, from a failure to distinguish between form and formalism.  As
the point is one of the utmost importance to every student of modern music, a
little digression upon it will not be out of place.  The school that looks
askance at Strauss takes for its idol Brahms, who is described by his more
enthusiastic admirers as the last of the great German masters, and acclaimed
as "a master of flawless form." Now any one who looks at Brahms's symphonies,
for example, with eyes unclouded by tradition, can see that his form is often
far from flawless.  He is less a master of form than "form" is master of him.
He is like a man in whom etiquette predominates over manners; his symphonies
behave as they have been told rather than as they feel.  To say this is not to
declare oneself an anti-Brahmsian.  One can admire to the full all the
profundity, the wisdom, the humanity, the poetry of that great spirit, and yet
contest his claim to be regarded as one of the kings of form.  With Beethoven
the form seems the inevitable outcome of the idea, as all first-rate,
vitalized form should; with Brahms the ideas are plainly manufactured to fit
the form.  The supposed necessity for pacifying this traditional monster is
visible on page after page.  It cramps Brahms in the making of his themes,
which often show the most evident signs of being selected mainly because they
were easily "workable." This in itself is a mark of imperfect command of form;
we should never smell the lamp in a work of art.  Or, to vary the analogy,
though a cathedral has to be begun with scaffolding, he is a clumsy builder
who leaves pieces of the scaffolding still visible in the completed structure.
A picture, as Sir Joshua Reynolds said, should give us the impression of being
not only done well but done easily.  In Brahms the labour, the calculation are
often too apparent.  We can overhear him muttering to himself, "Now I must
have my theme in augmentation, now in diminution; now I must fit A and B -
with what other end in view, indeed, did I make them both variants of the
arpeggio of the same chord? ^* now I have reached my double bar, and I must
flounder about, more or less helplessly, for a moment or two, till I can get
into my swing again" - and so on.  The whole movement, of course, is not made
up of cold calculations of this kind; but there are enough of them to prove
that Brahms was a slave to his form instead of being master of it and to make
it impossible to place him in the same category with Beethoven.  Such useless
academic fumbling as that at the beginning of the repeat in the first movement
of the D major symphony, and in a good deal of the first movement of the E
minor, quite destroys the vitality of the form for any one who can think for
himself instead of believing blindly what the professors tell him.  There are
too many patches of lead visible here and there in the bronze statue for us to
accept it as flawless.

[Footnote *: See, for example, the first subject and its supplementary theme
in the first movement of the D major symphony.]

     Strauss can afford to smile, then, at the criticism that calls him
"formless" because he chooses to make his own forms to suit his own ideas,
instead of, like Brahms, making his ideas to fit some one else's form.  And
whatever harm he may unconsciously do to foolish young composers who try to
imitate his methods, it is safe to say that it cannot surpass the harm that
has already been done by the slavish adherence to the so-called classical
forms.  If the one influence is responsible for much wild and chaotic writing,
the other must be blamed for a quite appalling amount of parrot-music that at
its best is mere academic primness and at its worst is deadly boredom.  The
average academy-made composer, indeed, with his tiresome and futile attempts
to make living music by the mechanical manipulation of a couple of arid
"subjects," reminds us of nothing so much as some poor patient Hottentot
rubbing two dry sticks together in the hope of getting a bit of fire.  And
when one sees how many capable and promising musicians have been stunted in
their growth by this system of Chinese compression, ^* one wishes that
somebody would write an exhaustive book on "Sonata Form, its Cause and Cure,"
and present a copy to every student who is in danger of catching the disease.

[Footnote *: Busoni has some penetrating remarks on the subject, apropos
partly of the finale to Brahms's first symphony, in his "Entwurf einer neuen
Aesthetik der Tonkunst" (Trieste, 1907).]

     Sonata form, in fact, was the special product of a special order of
musical ideas - the best possible way of giving to those particular ideas
coherence, balance, and unity.  But the ideas - especially the musico-poetic
ideas - of this generation are not those of the eighteenth or early nineteenth
century, and the old methods of building ideas up into large designs are no
longer wholly applicable; coherence, balance, and unity must still be sought,
but in different ways.  It is Strauss's great virtue that he has shown how
this can be done.  He is as solicitous about "form" as the most hide-bound
pedant could be; he himself has said, in reply to a question that was a little
indiscreet, "I always have form before my eyes in composing." The defects in
his later orchestral works, and they are regrettably many, are not at all of
form but of conception - they come from that lack of balance in his
disposition that makes it impossible for him to keep the cruder and more
freakish side of his nature under; but even when he is spoiling a fine picture
by inserting in it details that set our teeth on edge by their
inappropriateness or their inanity, he always weaves his threads together, the
cotton with the silk, in masterly fashion.  In Ein Heldenleben, for example,
those of us who would willingly go out of the hall, if we could, while the
"Adversaries" are sniggering and snarling and grunting, are bound to admire
the skill and the power with which he later on builds the chief "Adversary"
theme into the main musical tissue.  And as for breadth and scope of design,
the orchestral works from Tod und Verklarung onward show a grasp of musical
architecture and an audacity of mental span that can be paralleled, in the
nineteenth century, in the work only of Beethoven and of Wagner.  Beside the
power that builds up such an edifice as Zarathustra or Ein Heldenleben, the
Brahmsian faculty for going through the conventional forms of scholastic
jugglery with two or three fragments of carefully selected material does not
seem so wonderful that we should go into rhapsodies over it.

     As we have seen, Strauss made the transition from abstract to poetic
music very cautiously.  Aus Italien shows him carefully feeling his way from
the one to the other; though he is working upon a programme ^* he still
adheres in the main, like Berlioz, to the older symphonic form.  The work is
in four movements, each bearing a title - (1) "In the Campagna" (andante); (2)
"Among the Ruins of Rome," with the sub-title "Fantastic pictures' of vanished
splendour; feelings of melancholy and sorrow in the midst of the sunny
present" (allegro molto con brio); (3) "By Sorrento's Strand" (andantino); (4)
"Scenes of Popular Life in Naples" (allegro molto).  All the while there can
be seen the contest in the young composer between the traditions of his past
and the first stirrings of his future style.  The work is formal and free by
turns; it is neither pure poetic mood-painting nor pure abstract design, but a
compromise or a fluctuation between the two.  Strauss had not yet mastered the
art of framing his programme in such a way that no clashing shall result
between the poetic scheme and the musical structure, the two evolving at the
same rate along parallel lines.  Macbeth (1886-7) shows a marked advance in
this respect; it is really a superior work, from the point of view of form, to
Don Juan, which was composed in 1888.  In Don Juan Strauss meets for the first
time with one of the main difficulties of the symphonic poem - that of
combining a mass of disparate material, partly psychological and partly
concerned with the narration of external events, in one satisfactory picture.
The finest pages of Don Juan are those in which the nature of the programme
allows the musician to give free play to his power of pure musical development
- as in the first portrait of Don Juan himself, in the duet between him and
the Countess in the portrait of Anna, and in the tumultuous final section
commencing with the theme in the four horns.  The unsatisfactory portions of
the work are those - such as the brief suggestion of the country maiden ^* -
that are dragged in willy-nilly for a moment without forming any essential
part of the tissue as a whole and the carnival scene, where the sudden
changing of the kaleidoscope, together with something not quite convincing in
the music itself, strikes rather a jarring note.  In Don Juan, in fact,
magnificent as the work as a whole is, the canvas is a little too crowded and
the various parts of the picture are not balanced finely enough.  Macbeth
avoids these faults by living throughout, as it were, in the one medium.  It
is all psychology and no action.  If Strauss were to write a Macbeth to-day he
would probably not be content with the soul alone of the character; he would
make him pass through a series of definite adventures, and the score would be
half penetrating psychology and half exasperating realism.  His taste was
purer in 1887; and in many ways Macbeth, though it has never been so popular
as the other early works of Strauss, is a model both in its instinctively
right choice of material and in its musical facture.  There are, it is true, a
good many startling effects, but they are all justified by the subject.
Strauss makes no attempt whatever to cover the whole ground of Shakespeare's
drama; no other character is introduced but Lady Macbeth - and she is really
kept in the background the picture - and absolutely nothing "happens," not
even the murder of the king.  The whole drama is enacted in the soul of
Macbeth; apart from the comparatively few bars that depict his wife, the score
is entirely concerned with the internal conflict of the three main elements of
his character - his ambitious pride, his irresolution, and his love for Lady
Macbeth.  There is nothing here that is not pure "stuff for music," as Wagner
would have said.  The musical texture of the work is extraordinarily strong
and well-wrought; already the young man of twenty-two makes Liszt seem like an
amateur in comparison.  For the first time in the history of the symphonic
poem, in fact, a musical brain of the best kind, endlessly fertile in ideas
and with a masterly technique, is cultivating the form.  The score, youthful
as it is, already shows the rich polyphonic structure that is characteristic
of Strauss, and beside which the homophonic, lyrical style of Liszt seems
decidedly thin.

[Footnote *: There is not space in the present volume for a discussion of the
aesthetic justification of programme music.  I have attempted this in the
essay in "Musical Studies" to which I have already referred.  But
comparatively few people nowadays would hold to the old opinion that programme
music is the accursed thing.  The question used to be regarded as settled by
Beethoven's remark about his Pastoral Symphony being "mehr Ausdruck als
Malerei." No one troubles about that now, except to note that the symphony
itself flatly contradicts the theory.  It is, curiously enough, Wagner who is
now put up as the bulwark against the insidious invader.  His theory that
representative music is only fully comprehensible when there is a stage action
to elucidate it, and that it is impossible to keep the programme of an
orchestral work in one's head while following the music, has received more
reverence than it deserves.  I have elsewhere shown that Wagner's theory was
simply the expression of his own bias towards stage work.  If he could not
visualize for himself the protagonists of a symphonic poem like Ein
Heldenleben, that is no reason why other people, who can visualize them,
should give up doing so.  And Wagner's own work is an emphatic contradiction
of his theory.  The "Flying Dutchman" and "Tannhauser" overtures and the
"Lohengrin" prelude require us, if we are to understand them fully, to keep in
our minds certain sequences of external events without any help from the
stage.  His orchestral picture of Siegfried's Rhine-Journey again, in the
"Gotterdammerung," is programme music pure and simple.  The mind has to
associate certain characters with certain themes, and imagine certain changes
of scenery and action, just as it has to do, for instance, in Tchaikovski's
"Romeo and Juliet" overture.  But the vast general question cannot be
discussed here; and in the text of the present chapter it is assumed that the
reader accepts the broad principle of programme music just as he does the
symphony, the opera, or the oratorio.]

[Footnote *: It is obviously impossible to find space in this little volume
for an analysis of each of Strauss's symphonic poems.  Many excellent detailed
"guides" to them, however, can be obtained.]