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$Title{Richard Strauss
Chapter V: The Operas}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Newman, Ernest}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{guntram
music
strauss
salome
love
work
now
opera
house
old
see
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}
$Date{1908}
$Log{See Richard And His Father*0009501.scf
}
Title:       Richard Strauss
Author:      Newman, Ernest
Date:        1908

Chapter V: The Operas

     Both Strauss's first opera, Guntram, ^* and his second, Feuersnot, are
neglected now in Germany, and there are many who think that Salome, in spite
of the magnificence of much of the music, will before long share the same
fate.  There are special reasons in each case for this.  They lie mostly in
the nature of the subjects and the libretti; Strauss's operatic music is quite
as remarkable as his orchestral music, and in the opera house, as in the
concert room, he has, in spite of his faults, no equal among contemporary
composers for depth and range of expression.

[Footnote *: Strauss calls Guntram and Salome "Musikdramas" and Feuersnot a
"Singgedicht."  We may conveniently call them all three operas, declining to
follow the Teutonic mind in its mania for giving different names to what is
essentially the same thing.]

     The libretto of Salome is based on Frau Hedwig Lachmann's German
translation of Oscar Wilde's play; Strauss has done nothing more than abridge
this for his own purposes.  The libretto of Guntram, however, is entirely his
own work; that of Feuersnot is by Ernst von Wolzogen, but the idea of it was
given him by Strauss, and it is probable that the musician had something to do
with the composition of the poem.

     The story of Guntram was suggested to Strauss by a newspaper article on
certain secret societies that existed in Austria in the Middle Ages, whose
objects were partly artistic, partly religious and ethical.  Guntram is a
young knight who belongs to one of these societies, the members of which call
themselves "Die Streiter der Liebe" ("The Champions of Love"); their office is
to soften the hearts of men by their songs, and so to lead mankind to
universal brotherhood through love. Guntram has set out upon this work,
accompanied by an older member of the order, Friedhold ^*; he is to intercede
with the tyrant Duke Robert for his sorely oppressed subjects.  The scene
opens in a woodland glade, where Guntram is sharing his bread and fruit with a
number of these poor people.  Hunger and misery stalk through the ravaged
land; a rebellion, into which the people were goaded by their sufferings, has
just been mercilessly put down.  The Duke's wife, Freihild - "the Mother of
the Poor" - who at one time did what she could to alleviate their lot, has
now, they tell Guntram, been forbidden by her husband to help them.  The poor
people leave the scene, followed by Friedhold, and in a long monologue Guntram
meditates upon the beauty and innocence of nature and of his own childhood,
and upon the suffering brought into this idyllic world by the cruel passions
of men.  He springs to his feet, and calls in fervent words upon the Saviour
to help him to touch the heart of the Duke by his song and to bring peace to
the oppressed poor.  He is about to leave when a woman rushes in distractedly,
intending to drown herself in the lake at the back of the glade.  This proves
to be Freihild, who has been reduced to despair by the refusal of her hated
husband to allow her to show sympathy with his subjects.  Guntram holds her
back in spite of her entreaties; she believes him to be merely one of the
ordinary Minnesingers, whom she holds in small esteem.  He learns her name by
the cries of "Freihild" that come from the old Duke, her father, who has been
searching for her in the wood with his retainers.  He asks Guntram to name his
reward for rescuing his daughter; Guntram begs for the pardon of a number of
rebels who have been captured by Robert and are threatened with dire
punishment.  The request is granted, though much against the will of Robert;
and the Act closes with every one making for the court of the Duke, where a
feast is to be held in honour of the return of Freihild and the conquest of
the rebels.

[Footnote *: Friedhold is said by Dr. Arthur Seidl to be meant to suggest
Alexander Ritter.  He sees certain resemblances between the doctrines of
Guntram and those of Ritters opera "Wem die Krone?"]

     The opening of the second Act shows these festivities in full swing.
After the praises of Robert have been sung by the servile Minnesingers,
Guntram rises, seizes his harp, and delivers a long and impassioned eulogy of
the beauties of peace and freedom (the "Friedenserzahlung").  His eloquence
moves every one except the brutal Robert; even some of the vassals begin to
murmur against their ruler.  At last Guntram denounces Robert to his face; the
latter attacks him with his sword, but Guntram thrusts first, and Robert falls
dead.  All are horror-struck.  The old Duke at first regards the crime as a
premeditated one, the object being to seize Robert's kingdom.  He gravely and
sadly asks Guntram to complete his work by slaying him also; the minstrel,
however, is lost in amazement at his own act, and merely stares into space,
unconscious of what is going on around him.  In time the old Duke recovers his
self-control and his command over the previously wavering vassals; at his
orders they arrest Guntram, imprison him, and then march away to wreak new
vengeance on the rebels.  Only Freihild and the court Fool are left; the
latter is a sympathetic soul who feels for the poor people, and is at the same
time deeply but humbly in love with his tender mistress.  In Freihild's breast
a strong love has grown up for Guntram, who has delivered her from a hated
spouse and the land from a cruel tyrant.  She conceives the plan of fleeing
with him, and prevails upon the Fool to secure his escape.  This the Fool
does, though he mournfully recognizes that it means he will never see her
again; he promises to drug the drink of the gaolers and take Freihild into the
prison cell.

     The third Act takes place in a dungeon; outside can be heard the chant of
the monks who watch round the body of Robert.  Guntram, a prey to remorse, is
haunted by the spectre of the man he has murdered.  He is roused from his
painful reverie by the entrance of Freihild, who makes a passionate confession
of the love his noble song has aroused in her bosom, and implores him to fly
with her.  To her astonishment and despair he announces his intention of
leaving her for ever.  Just as he runs to the door, Friedhold enters; he has
been sent by the Brotherhood of the "Streiter der Liebe" to bid Guntram to
appear before them, and make his atonement for having slain a man and so
transgressed the laws of the order, which are founded wholly on love.  Guntram
refuses to go, and then explains everything to Friedhold and Freihild.  He has
indeed committed a crime.  But this did not consist in the mere fact of
killing the Duke.  The act itself was good; it was the motive of the act that
was bad, and the real motive, he has found on examination of his own heart,
was earthly love for Freihild.  For this no organization of men can punish
him; his punishment can come only from himself - he must renounce Freihild for
ever.  Previously he had believed in the outward laws that bind men; now,
illuminated by sad experience, he knows that no one but himself has
jurisdiction over the spiritual part of him: -

          Eine einzige Stunde
          Hat mich erleuchtet,
          Doch jetzt bin einsam,
          Allein mit mir selbst!
          Meinen Leid hilft einzig nur
          Meines Herzens Drang;
          Meine Schuld suhnt nur
          Die Busse meiner Wahl;
          Mein Leben bestimmt
          Meines Geistes Gesetz;
          Mein Gott spricht
          Durch mich selbst nur zu mir.

     The Fool enters with the news that the old Duke has been killed, and the
whole land rejoices that Freihild is now its ruler.  Guntram bids her assume
the office and fill it for the good of the poor and the suffering.  Incapable
of speaking, she kneels down and kisses his hand; in the deepest emotion he
bids her farewell and goes forth alone.

     The theme of the opera will be recognized as a blend of Wagner and
Nietzsche - a little of the "Uebermensch" of the philosopher coming in to
complete the musician's favourite doctrines of "renunciation" and "redemption
by love." No doubt its Wagnerian tinge is one of the causes of the failure of
Guntram to keep the stage; the world is growing a little weary of all these
good but rather tiresome people who are continually renouncing, or being
redeemed, or insisting on redeeming some one else; it finds it a little hard
to bear even in Wagner, and will not stand much of it from any other musician.
The occasional slowness of the action, the long stretches of rather nebulous
philosophizing, and also, it is said, the difficulty of finding tenors capable
of performing the part of Guntram, are other reasons why the opera has been
shelved.  It is a pity that it should be so, for Guntram is a remarkable piece
of work.  It is quite true that the musical style, like the poetic, shows many
traces of Wagner's influence.  The scene in the Court, where Guntram sings to
the assembly, reminds us of "Tannhauser," and there are other situations that
suggest "Parsifal." There is something of the "Waldweben" in Guntram's poetic
reverie in the first Act; there are suggestions now and then of "Lohengrin";
and one of the love themes is so plainly taken from "Tristan" that one wonders
how Strauss himself could help noticing the close similarity.  There are, too,
a few pages in the score where the writing is thick and lustreless, and one or
two places where the effort to be "characteristic" - to "paint" in music - has
caused Strauss to write music that is merely forced and ugly, as in the case
of the theme typifying the rigid laws of the Brotherhood, ^* which is almost as
violently illogical as some of the writing in the songs.  But the bulk of the
score touches a high plane of beauty, and curiously enough, in spite of the
occasional Wagnerism of the music, the style throughout gives one the
impression of being personal to Strauss.  The high seriousness of the work and
the spirit of humanism that breathes from it are exceedingly impressive;
Guntram alone, with its ardour of love, and above all, the tenderness of its
sympathies for humanity, is sufficient to refute the superficial notion that
Strauss is merely a clever intellectualist playing at being a musician.  Some
depth of thought and very considerable depth of feeling have gone to the
making of the work.  The character drawing is a little inexpert here and
there.  Guntram and Freihild and the moaning, lamenting people are clearly and
convincingly limned; the others are not characterized in the music with
anything like the same veracity.  The musical tissue is, like all Strauss's
work, endlessly rich in ideas; there is a grandeur of manner at times, a
long-sustained energy of invention, that is to be met with elsewhere in no
other operas but those of Wagner.  And Strauss shows in Guntram the same power
as in his orchestral works of devising themes that are both expressive in
themselves and fertile in possibilities of development; the various
metamorphoses of the leading motives and their interplay with each other are
carried out in a masterly way.  Altogether Guntram is a great work, the many
merits of which will perhaps some day restore it to the stage from which it is
now most unjustly banished.

[Footnote *: See, for example, the statement of it at the beginning of the
prelude to the third Act.]

     Some eight or nine years elapsed between the composition of Guntram and
that of Feuersnot.  In the interval Strauss had written Till Eulenspiegel,
Also sprach Zarathustra, Don Quixote and Ein Heldenleben, so that by 1900 his
individual style was fully made, and the score of Feuersnot is wholly his own,
not a trace of Wagner's manner being visible.

     He got the idea of the opera from an old saga of the Netherlands,
entitled "Das erloschene Feuer zu Audenaerde."  This tells of a certain young
man who loved a maiden, who, however, was cold and contemptuous towards him.
At last, pretending to relax her severity, she told him that if he would place
himself in a large basket on the following night she would draw it and him up
to her chamber.  The young man was in the basket punctually at midnight; but
the false maiden only drew him half-way up the wall of the house and left him
suspended there, to suffer in the morning the gibes of all the townspeople.
When he was released, burning with rage, he went to an old magician in a
neighbouring wood and asked him to revenge him upon the maiden.  The magician
instantly extinguished every light and every fire in the town.  When the
distressed citizens at length assembled to discuss what should be done, the
magician attended the meeting, disguised as a venerable burgher.  After
exacting from them all a promise that they would follow his advice to the
uttermost, he told them that the failure of the fire was due to the unkind
treatment of the young man by the maiden, and that as a penance she must
appear in the market unclothed.  Each of the burghers was to bring a candle to
the scene.  The reluctant maiden was made to remove her clothing, whereupon a
flame darted out from her back.  From this all the candles of the town were
lighted, each burgher conscientiously refusing to take a light from the candle
of his neighbour, but going direct to the parent flame itself.

     In this form, of course, the story was quite unsuitable to the stage.
Strauss and Wolzogen, however, with only a few alterations, made it quite
workable and decidedly much more charming than it is in its original shape.
The action of the opera - which, by the way, is in one Act only - takes place
in Munich, on midsummer eve in the "fabelhafte Unzeit" (legendary No-Time).
The scene is laid in the Sentlingergasse.  The children are going from house
to house, in accordance with an old custom, begging wood for their fires.
From the Burgermeister, Ortolf Sentlinger, they get a large basketful of wood,
while his beautiful young daughter, Diemut, and her three companions give them
sweetmeats and dainties.  All their thumping at the door of the house on the
opposite side of the street produces for a long time no effect.  The
neighbours give varied descriptions, favourable and unfavourable, of the
inhabitant, from which it appears that he is a young man, Kunrad by name, who
lives in complete solitariness, and of whom little is known.  At length he
appears at the door of the house, looking absorbed and puzzled at the noise;
he has been immersed in study, and finds it hard at first to comprehend what
is going on in the outer world.  When he finally understands that it is
midsummer eve, and that the jovial fires are being lit by the children, a
revulsion of feeling comes over him; he will give up dreaming, and live and
enjoy like the rest.  He tells the children to take as much of the wood of his
house as they can as his contribution to their festival, and sets them the
example by tearing the rotten old window shutters to pieces.  Meanwhile, he
has been gazing with ardent admiration at Diemut; and he suddenly signalizes
his return to humanity by kissing her on the mouth, much to her annoyance and
to the scandal of the burghers.

     The crowd leaves the stage, going towards the gate where the fire is to
be kindled.  Diemut, nursing her wrong and planning vengeance, is seated at
the balcony of her father's house.  Kunrad, in the street below, confesses his
love to her.  She appears to yield to his request to be admitted to her
chamber, and points to the basket that has contained the wood given by her
father to the children.  He enters it; she draws it up part of the way, and
then pretends that her strength is unequal to pulling it any further.  Down
below, her three girl companions have been watching the progress of the plan.
They laughingly call the citizens to the spot, and Kunrad is at last aware of
how he has been duped.  In vehement tones he calls on his magician friend to
help him by extinguishing all the lights and fires in the town.  This
immediately happens.  Every one now hastens to the house; the citizens are
angry, the children are scared; the only contented souls are a number of
loving young couples, who softly express their cordial satisfaction with the
sudden darkening of the town.  By this time Kunrad has swung himself on to the
balcony of the house, whence he laughs at the crowd below.  Then he harangues
them at length; he tells them that in his old house there once dwelt a great
master, one Reichardt, who did the town great good and brought great honour
upon it, for which he received nothing but envy and hatred.  He himself has
been called to continue the work of the old master, but for this he needs the
sustaining light of womanly love.  The extinguishing of the fires has been a
punishment for Diemut's scornful conduct; and they will not be relit until she
has done appropriate penance for her crime.  Diemut, who has secretly loved
Kunrad all the time, now appears on the balcony and draws him into her
chamber.  Down below the crowd comments on the matter and waits for the sign
that the penance has been completed and that Diemut has atoned for her
previous "gottverlassene Sprodigkeit."  The moon has now disappeared, and the
town is in total darkness.  Only the tenderest tones of the orchestra, and of
a harp, glockenspiel, and harmonium behind the scenes, are heard.  Then a
faint glimmer of light is seen through the windows of Diemut's room; the love
music in the orchestra grows more and more passionate, and as it reaches its
climax all the fires and lights in the town simultaneously blaze out again,
amid the joyous cries of the citizens.  The voices of Kunrad and Diemut are
heard for a moment, behind the scenes, blending in a cry of love, and as the
curtain goes down the children are seen dancing gaily, and the citizens
looking up at Diemut's window and congratulating the Burgermeister her father.

     The score of Feuersnot is an extraordinary blend of simplicity and
profundity; the utmost strength and daring of technique and the most gorgeous
wealth of orchestral colouring go hand in hand with the most exquisite
sweetness and naivete.  Passages like the love scene, or that in which Kunrad
declares his love for Diemut, touch as high a point of passionate beauty as
Strauss has ever reached, except perhaps here and there in Salome.  On the
other hand, nothing could surpass, for pure, simple, heart-easing charm, the
melodies in which he has delineated the more homely features of the story,
such as the merry-making of the children and the colloquies of the
townspeople.  He uses several old Munich folk-songs, but, delightful as they
are, none of them is equal to his own melodies in the folk-song manner - the
lovely choruses of the children, for example, and the melody sung by Diemut
near the beginning of the opera, where she distributes the sweetmeats among
the little ones.  The whole work, in fact, with its glow and vivacity, gives
one the impression of having been a pure delight to the composer.  There are
comparatively few instances in it of that tendency to false or exaggerated
characterization that mars so much of Strauss's later work; as a whole the
opera is notably lucid and restrained, in spite of its passion and its
constant high spirits.  The reason of its failure to keep the stage must be
sought elsewhere than in the music.  Perhaps the story does not commend itself
to all tastes; and it must be confessed that once or twice, especially when
the populace is waiting for the light to appear in Diemut's chamber, the
language is of a freedom that has no parallel in opera libretti.  To many
people, no doubt, the tincture in the score of the "Ueberbrettl" spirit, of
which Wolzogen is the accredited representative in Germany, is not altogether
agreeable; though one would think that people have only to take the
fundamentally naive atmosphere of the work as it is to enjoy it all
thoroughly.

     Perhaps, again, the satirical tendency of some parts of the opera tells
against it.  Strauss has used it as a mouthpiece for his own feeling of
soreness at the comparative neglect that had been his lot in his own native
city of Munich.  It had been similarly ungrateful to Wagner in the sixties,
during the patronage of him by King Ludwig; the intrigues against him were at
one time sufficiently strong to drive him from the town.  The old master
Reichardt who once inhabited Kunrad's house, and who had been so ungratefully
treated by the burghers, is of course, Richard Wagner; as Kunrad speaks of his
power over the spirits the orchestra softly gives out the Valhalla motive from
the "Rhinegold."  The allusion is driven home still more patently later on,
when, in a few neat lines, there are plays upon the names of both Wagner and
Strauss, as well as that of the librettist, Wolzogen: -

          Sein (i.e. Meister Reichardt's) Wagen kam allzu
               gewagt Euch vor,
          Da triebt Ihr den Wagner aus dem Thor.
          Den bosen Feind, den triebt Ihr nit aus,
          Der stellt sich Euch immer aufs Neue zum Strauss
          Wohl zogen mannige wackere Leut',
          Die ein wagendec Wirken freut,
          Fern ausdem Reich in dem Isargau,
          Zu wipfelfreudigem Nesterbau.

And that Strauss regards himself as the successor of Wagner is made quite
clear to us by the fact that Kunrad inhabits Meister Richardt's old house, and
has received from the old master some excellent advice as to how to do his
work and how to treat the public when it praises or blames him.  Later on the
burghers say the same thing: -

          Erwahlt ward er vom Alten
          Des hohen Amts zu walten.
          Ihr doch in eurem Unverstand
          Habt keiner nix gespurt, noch gespannt.
          Weil er vom Ort geburtig war,
          Meint Ihr, war's net weit mit ihm her.

All this is quite true and very delightful, but the fun and the satire are
much more effective in one's own room, among one's friends, than in the
theatre.  Satire ages soon, because the thing satirized passes out of general
memory; and the difficulty of recalling it is all the greater when the appeal
has to be made to so intellectually diverse a crowd as a theatre audience.

     Salome, like Feuersnot, is in one Act, running on without a break for
nearly two hours.  Like the earlier opera, again, it has no overture.  The
scene is the terrace in Herod's palace; at the back is a cistern in which John
the Baptist is confined.  Narraboth, a young Syrian captain, and some
soldiers, are on guard.  Narraboth commences, after three bars for the
orchestra, with a eulogy of the beauty of the young princess, Salome, who is
in the banqueting hall, feasting with Herod, her mother Herodias, and the
Court.  While a page tries to dissuade him from his mad passion for the
princess, which presages evil for him, the voice of John is heard from the
cistern, prophesying the coming of a mightier One than he.  Further
conversation goes on among the soldiers; then Salome leaves the banqueting
hall and comes upon the terrace.  She has been unable to endure any longer the
amorous glances that Herod, her mother's husband, has been casting at her, and
has come to the terrace for the coolness of the air.  The Baptist's voice is
again heard.  Salome is arrested by it; she inquires who he is, and learns
that it is the prophet of whom Herod and Herodias are both afraid.  Her
curiosity is aroused, and she finally so works upon the love of Narraboth for
her that he disobeys the strict orders of Herod and has the Baptist brought up
from the cistern.  He immediately breaks out into denunciations of Herodias
and her sins.  Salome conceives a mad passion for him; it gradually
overmasters her, and she gives vent to her wild longing for him in language of
the utmost abandonment, the recurring burden of which is, "I will kiss thy
mouth, Jokanaan."  Narraboth, distracted by love for Salome and fear of the
vengeance of Herod, slays himself at her feet; but neither this nor the
exhortations of John can restore her to sanity.

     At last he curses her and goes down again into the cistern.  Herod,
Herodias, and the Court come upon the scene.  He is excited with wine,
nervous, superstitious, and ill at ease, imagining ill omens to be all around
him.  He is again pursuing Salome when the voice of John is once more heard
from the cistern.  Herod declines to yield to Herodias's desire that the
prophet shall be given up to the Jews, for he is "a holy man who has seen
God."  This leads to a dispute among the Jews who are present as to the
sanctity of John, and as to whether any one since Elias has seen God - a
grotesque and comic musical tour de force.  John's further denunciations of
Herodias anger her, and when Salome finally dances in response to the
entreaties of Herod, who promises her any reward she may ask, even unto the
half of his kingdom, Herodias supports her daughter in her demand for the head
of John.  Herod, sobered now, for a long time tries to dissuade Salome from
this; at last he is compelled to give the ring of death to a soldier, who
takes it to the executioner.  Salome listens in silence at the wall of the
cistern, until the great black arm of the executioner rises, bearing the head
of John on a silver shield.  All are horrified except Herodias, who smiles,
and Salome, who seizes the head and delivers a long and passionate address to
it.  He would not let her kiss his lips, she says; now she will kiss them.
"If thou hadst seen me thou wouldst have loved me.  I am athirst for thy
beauty; I am hungry for thy body, and neither wine nor fruit can appease my
desire. . . ."  Herod's terror deepens; he bids the slaves put out the
torches, and the stage is in darkness.  Salome's mad rhapsody still goes on,
and at last becomes unendurable by the terrified Herod.  A ray of moonlight
illumines her; Herod calls out wildly, "Kill that woman," and the soldiers
crush her beneath their shields.

     It is easy enough to talk enthusiastically of Salome, or to disparage it;
but to look at it critically is a very difficult matter, so full is it of new
and bewildering things.  Some parts of it, such as the scene between Salome
and John, and the final scene of Salome with the head, are recognized at once
to be entrancingly beautiful; it is remarkable, indeed, what depth of real
feeling Strauss gives, by his music, to Wilde's cold, mechanical, enamelled
lines, and the wax flowers of his imagery.  And even where the music is not
beautiful, but merely a tissue of cunning tours de force of characterization
and stage suggestion, it sweeps us off our feet.  But whether this latter kind
of thing will keep its interest for us is another question, that only time can
answer.  The dazzling cleverness and the inexhaustible wealth of colour in the
score, the marvellous ingenuity with which every terrible detail of the scene
or the psychology of the actors is brought home to us by the orchestra - these
things are literally the world's wonder at present.  But already we can see
that there is much in the opera that is sheer ugliness, and the style has a
good deal of that cold perversity that is so repellent in all Strauss's later
work.  Difficulties are created simply for the pleasure of overcoming, or
trying to overcome, them; the straight road to the desired end is
ostentatiously avoided simply because it is straight.  And although it is
almost impossible for any man yet to make up his mind finally about Salome, it
is quite clear that it marks no improvement on Don Quixote and Ein Heldenleben
and the Symphonia Domestica in the one point in which improvement would have
been most welcome.  While Strauss's genius certainly develops in strength and
beauty in one direction, it as certainly shows degeneration in another.  We
get from the opera the same impression as from the later orchestral works,
that Strauss is incapable now of making a large picture sane and harmonious
throughout; somewhere or other he must spoil it by extravagance and perversity
and foolishness.  He can do every clever and astounding thing that a musician
could do; what he apparently cannot or will not do now is to write twenty
continuous pages that shall be wholly beautiful and unmarred by bravado or by
folly.

     It is premature, of course, to attempt to appraise the final value of a
musician who is still only in his forty-fourth year, and who may, therefore,
in the normal course of things, be expected to have many years of activity yet
before him.  The difficulty is all the greater in the case of a man like
Strauss, each one of whose works seems to inhabit a new mental world and to
create a new musical style.  Nevertheless, so much of his music has been long
familiar to us that it is possible to look at it critically and even
historically.  One thing is certain, that he has put into music a greater
energy, a greater stress of feeling and a greater weight of thinking, than any
other composer of the day.  There is not one of his larger works since Aus
Italien that is not different in outlook and in idiom from all the rest.  Like
Wagner and Wolf, he is Protean; his sympathies seem to have no restrictions,
and his idiom varies with almost every work he writes.  No musician, indeed,
has ever repeated himself less, in so large an output, than Strauss has done.
His style is marked by no constantly recurring mannerisms, such as we meet
with in the works of other men - the phrase-repetitions of Tchaikovski, for
example, the arpeggio-born melodies of Brahms, the two-bar limp of Grieg, or
the slavery of Debussy to certain favourite harmonic combinations.  Strauss's
melodies and harmonies are endlessly new.  There is a "Strauss manner" in
orchestration that can be imitated because the factors of it - the instruments
- are the same for every one; but there is no "Strauss manner" in melody or
harmony that can be imitated, for these are never wholly the same in two
successive works.  There is only one characteristic of his melodies that can
be detached by analysis, and this is not imitable in a way that could deceive
any one who knows the originals; his melodic line is notable for the great
sweep of its curve, the heights and depths it compasses within a bar or two.
This freedom of line is, indeed, one of the reasons for the impression of
superabundant energy that so many of Strauss's melodies give us.

     Harmonically he has apparently not innovated so much as Debussy, but then
he is always master of his harmonies, can always see and think his way through
them, which Debussy frequently cannot.  Harmony is the one matter in which the
artist is always ahead of his public; we have only to remember how strange
"Tristan," or even some parts of "Tannhauser," sounded to us at a first
hearing to recognize that a great deal of Strauss's apparent harmonic
anarchism will look like ordered simplicity itself in another twenty years.
Even now it is amusing to turn up some of the criticisms of works like Tod und
Verklarung upon their first performance in this country, and to see how
chaotic many people thought this music, which now seems as lucid as a page of
Mozart.  There are, it is true, several passages in his work, more especially
in the songs, to which we cannot imagine human ears ever being reconciled;
they are as demonstrably nonsensical as a paragraph of print that has been
dropped by the type-setter and recklessly put together again by the first man
who picked it up.  And there are other passages where the conclusion seems
obvious that Strauss does not hear tonal combinations quite as we do.  The
unpleasant sequence of sevenths in Ein Heldenleben, for example - if it is not
a mere piece of freakishness, which hardly seems likely - probably sounds
differently in Strauss's ear from what it does in ours.  It must be
remembered, too, that his style is often highly polyphonic; and many a
sequence in his orchestral works that seems obscure to the man in the street
is perfectly intelligible if listened to with the polyphonic as well as the
harmonic ear.

     In orchestration he is an acknowledged master.  It is quite true that he
is sometimes excessively noisy, and that he often falls a victim to the modern
mania for using a pot of paint where a mere brushful would do equally well or
better.  There are plenty of passages in his later works where the means
employed, the number of notes written, and the amount of blowing or scraping
or thumping done by the players in the orchestra, are out of all proportion to
the effect obtained; as he himself has happily put it in his edition of
Berlios's treatise on instrumentation - where he warns young composers against
the follies of over-colouring which he constantly commits himself - it is not
worth while sending out an army corps to catch a skirmisher.  But on the whole
his orchestration is the most daring and successful thing of its kind since
Berlioz's.  It has not the almost infallible certainty of the scoring of men
like Wagner and Elgar, who love sheer beauty of orchestral colour too much to
play any tricks with it; but in spite of its many uglinesses and frequent
miscalculations it is a marvellous storehouse of new and wonderful effects of
tone-colour.  What will be the ultimate result of some of his innovations it
is hard to say.  His appetite for increased wood-wind, horns, and brass, for
new instruments, such as the heckelphone that is used in Salome, and for older
instruments, such as the saxophone, that are not part of the ordinary
orchestra, seems to grow with what it feeds on.  To many of us a lot of this
colour, which at best only thickens the picture instead of illuminating it,
appears wholly superfluous; the score of the Symphonia Domestica, for example,
would sound just as well with a third of the notes and several of the players
omitted.  But it is hopeless to appeal to the reason of composers in this
matter; and the only satisfaction, the only hope of salvation for music and
for our ears, is that the material consideration of expense will always do
something at least to check this haemorrhage of notes.  Composers will some
day have to choose between writing orchestral works, with scores of
instruments, for merely mental performance, and writing works that are within
the financial possibilities of the average concert society or opera house.

     This excess of orchestration in Strauss's later works is only part of a
general tendency to excess that has become increasingly evident during the
last few years.  On all sides - in his choice of subjects as well as in his
treatment of them, in his harmonic system and his orchestral technique - he
shows a disposition to an extravagance that will ultimately do his art no
good.  What the cause of this may be it is hard to say.  Some of it may be due
to physical and mental overstrain, the result of a more strenuous life than
any man who wishes to keep his brain and nervous system at their best has any
right to live; Strauss's youthful balance and athletic self-control may have
been partly destroyed.  Some of it, on the other hand, may come from a
deliberate intention to stagger humanity.  If, as seems likely, Strauss has
been embittered by some of the opposition he has had to contend with, we can
only regret that it should be so.  But the fact remains that something
unpleasant has come into his art during the past few years.  When we think of
the high-minded seriousness and the self-mastery of works like Tod und
Verklarung and Guntram, and then of the grimaces and twitchings and mad
laughter that deface so much of the later work, it is impossible to feel that
Strauss's genius is developing as a harmonious whole.

     Yet with all his present faults he remains by far the most commanding
figure in contemporary music.  In the preceding pages I have tried to indicate
his real significance in history; he has carried programme music to apparently
its ultimate limit by applying the Wagner-Liszt system of theme-transformation
with an audacity and a brilliance of which they never dreamt, and by turning
upon this kind of music all the force of an energetic and teeming brain and a
marvellous technique.  He has already enriched music with more new ideas than
any musician since Wagner.  He has made music realistic, not only in the
coarse sense of material imitation, but in the high sense that with him
musical character drawing has become extraordinarily poignant and veracious.
Such humour and such pathos as those of Don Quixote, for example, represent a
quite new phase of musical psychology.  He has got away from the wigs and
tights and the stage apparatus of Wagner, and by his music alone paints for us
the kind of men and women we see around us day by day.  But unfortunately his
indiscriminate worship of reality, together with an unexampled cleverness of
technique, has led him to attempt to express too much in music.  He is apt to
become too pictorial, too external, too crudely suggestive.  And the very
vehemence of these attempts will bring about all the sooner the general
reaction that is bound to come in European music, a reversion to simpler
methods and more purely emotional moods.  Perhaps he himself, as he grows
older and wiser, may lead this reaction.  At present his greatest admirers
cannot help admitting mournfully that for some years now he has shown a
regrettable lack of artistic balance.  Nothing that he does now is pure gold
throughout; one listens to the finer pages in all his later music as the
labourer's son in "Marius the Epicurean" watched his father at work at the
brick-kiln - "with a sorrowful distaste for the din and dirt."  His new
opera, which is to be produced early next year, will probably show whether he
is going to realize our best hopes or our worst fears.

[See Richard And His Father: The Labourer's Son]
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