Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0009/00090.txt

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$Title{Richard Strauss
Chapter I: Life}
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$Author{Newman, Ernest}
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$Date{1908}
$Log{Hear On His Father*54160015.aud
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See Marquardtstein*0009002.scf
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Title:       Richard Strauss
Author:      Newman, Ernest
Date:        1908

Chapter I: Life

     Richard Strauss has for so long been the subject of heated discussion in
the musical circles of two continents that it is hard to realize that he has
not yet attained his forty-fourth year.  Thirteen years ago, at an age when
Beethoven had got only as far as his unadventurous first symphony, and Wagner
was merely laying the foundations of his style in "Rienzi" and "The Flying
Dutchman," Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel and Also sprach Zarathustra had already
marked him out as a revolutionary of the most daring type; and one needs only
to recall the titles of some of his later works - Don Quixote, Ein
Heldenleben, the Symphonia Domestica, and Salome - to be reminded that around
each of them has raged a critical battle as furious as any that was fought
about the maturer works of Wagner.  He has often been as unfortunate in his
friends as he has been fortunate in his enemies; he has been foolishly abused
by critics of the type of the late Eduard Hanslick, whose condemnation of any
piece of modern music could almost be taken as a certificate of its
excellence, and he has been admired with equal foolishness by others, who were
wilfully blind to some of the serious defects of his work, but who used him as
a stick with which to beat a contrasted form of art which they disliked.  All
this commotion at least testifies to Strauss's significance in the history of
music, for the whole musical world does not form itself into two armed camps,
breathing fire and slaughter at each other, over any man of less than
first-rate importance.  And a rough measure of the effect he makes even on
those who dislike him most may be had in the violence of the epithets they
hurl at his head, some of which take us back to the good old days when the
"Meistersinger" overture was called "an ugly riot of dissenance," and the
opera itself "a boneless tone mollusc," and when "Parsifal" reminded
delicate-souled German critics of "the howls of a dog undergoing vivisection."
To the expert in the history of journalistic objurgation, epithets of this
kind tell their own tale; if a bundle of them, relating to some one of whom he
otherwise knew nothing, were brought to him, he could almost reconstruct the
artist from them as a scientist can reconstruct the form of an animal from the
evidence of a few scattered bones.  When a certain dramatic critic, for
example, called Ibsen "a muck-ferreting dog," the skilled in these matters,
hearing the phrase and knowing the critical record of the author of it, could
at once understand the ideals of Ibsen without the necessity of reading a line
of him.  And when we find Strauss being thrown into the same plague-pit with
Ibsen and other moderns, and the same kind of burial service being imprecated
over him, that in itself is enough to prove his main offence to be that he is
a progressive, and so to arouse the sympathy of many people for him.  No one
has yet compiled a Straussean Schimpflexikon on the lines of the one that was
compiled about Wagner, - an entertaining collection of all the terms of abuse
that have been showered upon him; but when it is compiled it will make
agreeable reading for posterity.  Already we can smile at some of the earlier
judgments upon Strauss.  From a book published by a well-known American critic
only four years ago I cull the following choice cauliflowers of rhetoric, all
prompted, be it observed, by three of Strauss's early works that are now
accepted in every concert room as blandly as the "Tannhauser" overture, Tod
und Verklarung, Don Juan, and Till Eulenspiegel.  The last-named, according to
our critic, is "a study in musical depiction of wandering vulgarity, of
jocular obscenity, a vast and coruscating jumble of instrumental cackles about
things unfit to be mentioned.  . . . With Ibsens, Maeterlincks, and
Strausses," the indignant prophet goes on, writing with his foot on the loud
pedal all the time, "plucking like soulless ghouls upon the snapping
heartstrings of humanity, treating the heart as a monochord for the scientific
measurement of intervals of pain, and finally poking with their skeleton
fingers in the ashes of the tomb to see if they could not find a single
smouldering ember of human agony, we had attained a rare state of morbidity in
art.  We felt that when art had turned for her inspiration to the asylum, the
brothel, and the pest-house, it was time for a new renaissance." It is hinted
that some of the material of Don Juan and Till Eulenspiegel is "unfit for
publication." Still beating the big drum in the interests of musical
sanitation, much as the priests in the Middle Ages used to scare away evil
spirits by ringing the church bells noisily, our author goes on to say that
with Strauss "the orchestra is transformed into a psychoscope, and the
symphony is become a treatise on mental diseases and methods of conversing
with the dead." "The modern ear," in fact, "is suffering from acute
myringomycrosis, a cheerful affliction caused by the growth of fungi on the
ear drum." We read of "the chortling barbarians of the Strauss phantasy," who
are separated from other and more civilized beings by a "vast and impassable
gulf of fetid inspiration." Strauss is leading music along a path that can
only finish "in the corruption and rank odour of the morgue." And becoming a
little incoherent, as prophets are apt to do when their rhetoric gets into
their head, our author has a final fling at "Till Eulenspiegel, Gargantua of
Germany, noisome, nasty, rollicking Till, with the whirligig scale of a yellow
clarinet in his brain and the beer-house rhythm of a pint pot in his heart."
And yet schoolgirls listen with enjoyment to these foul and pestilential
works, and, what is worse, take their mothers to hear them!

     This wild and malodorous language, taken from an essay by a critic who
can write sensibly enough on other topics, is quoted here not so much for its
own sake as to give the reader an idea of the frenzy of opposition that
Strauss raises in some worthy minds.  As I have said, the very violence of the
language is in itself an evidence of the disturbing effect he has had upon
modern music and musicians; the pole must have gone very deep into the
stagnant pond to bring so much mud as this to the surface.  And the peculiar
wording of the charges against Strauss indicates the new impulses he has
brought into music.  When dramatic critics of a certain type accuse a new
author of immorality we may be sure that all he has really done is to be
deeply moved by certain sad aspects of human nature and human life, and to try
to communicate to his fellow-men his own sense of the pity that such evil
should be.  And when composers like Wagner and Strauss are accused of
outraging humanity in their music, we may be sure that it is only because they
have felt more of the sting or the sweetness or the humour of life than their
forerunners did, and have tried to express it all in their music.  We are not
at present, be it noted, passing any judgment, favourable or unfavourable,
upon the actual work of Strauss.  That work must finally stand or fall in
virtue of what it does, not in virtue of what it aims at doing; that is to
say, if the expression itself is false or the architecture bad, the composer
cannot fall back upon a plea of good intentions.  It may be a desirable thing
to bring music into closer touch with actual life than the great classical
masters have done - that line of development, indeed, was one that music was
bound to follow in our own day; but if the work is not beautifully conceived
and strongly wrought it will not endure.  The men who lead the multitude to a
new Pisgah do not always enter the promised land themselves.  They may live in
history, as Liszt, for example, does, less for what they have achieved than
for what they have made it possible, by flinging open the gates, for other
people to achieve.  The opinion of those who regard Strauss as merely a
charlatan and a poseur, a self-conscious manufacturer of ugliness and
eccentricity, may be put aside as not worth consideration.  But those who are
sympathetically interested in his work and in the musical development for
which it stands may reasonably ask whether he is one of the great creators or
only one of the great emancipators; whether his music will keep its interest
for the ear and the soul of future generations, or will simply, like that of
Monteverde or that of Philipp Emanuel Bach, be a historical link between two
greater phases of musical thought.  This question has, in fact, been asked by
many thoughtful observers.  In the following pages we shall try to see which
way the evidence points.

     Strauss's father, Franz Strauss (born 26 February, 1822), was the first
horn player in the Munich Court Orchestra, and the author of several studies
for the instrument.  He was an artist of exceptional ability, and specially
famous for the beauty of his phrasing.  "My father," Richard Strauss once
said, "was, as regards beauty and volume of tone, perfection of phrasing, and
technique, one of the most notable of horn players."  In the light of the
revolutionary tendencies exhibited by his son, it is interesting to learn that
Franz Strauss was an orthodox conservative musician, who never got over his
early anti-Wagnerian bias.  Wagner himself was well aware of this bias, and
once, it is said, after a performance of one of his operas, in which the
hornist had played even more exquisitely than usual, remarked banteringly that
Strauss could not have played the music so beautifully had he been a real
anti-Wagnerian; to which Strauss merely replied doggedly that "that had
nothing to do with it."  He married Josephine, the daughter of Georg Pschorr,
the well-known brewer of Munich beer.  Their son Richard was born 11 June,
1864; a younger sister, Johanna, to whom some of the composer's works are
dedicated, came into the world 9 June, 1867.

[Hear On His Father]
The first horn player in the Munich Court Orchestra.

     Richard's musical ability showed itself at a very early age.  He had
already begun to play the piano at four, his mother being his first tutor; at
six he composed a "Schneider-polka" in the accommodating key of C major, - his
tiny brain probably being unequal at the time to the strain of flats and
sharps, - and a Christmas song.  From 1870-1874 he attended an elementary
school at Munich; here he worked hard at the technique of the piano and at
that of the violin.  In 1874 he entered at the Gymnasium, where he remained
until 1882.  From there he proceeded to the University of Munich, leaving
this, however, in the following year.  In the midst of his other studies he
was receiving a careful musical education.  From 1875 to 1880 he had a
thorough grounding in harmony, counterpoint, and instrumentation from
Hofkapellmeister F. W. Meyer, to whom later on he dedicated the Serenade for
wind instruments that was published as opus 7.  In the next compositions of
his of which we hear, the pale domestic glories of the "Schneiderpolka" and
the Christmas song are left far behind; we read of a chorus from the "Electra"
of Sophocles and a "Festival Chorus" being performed at a "Prufungs-Konzert"
at the Gymnasium.  By the time he had reached his sixteenth year he had become
something of a public character.  In 1880 a singer at the Munich opera, Frau
Meysenheim, sang three of his songs in public.  On 16 March, 1881, the Benno
Walter Quartet, at one of their concerts, played his String Quartet in A major
(op. 2); while on the 30th of the same month Hermann Levi gave a performance
of his Symphony in D minor, a work in four movements, that has hitherto
remained unpublished.  All this while his training, as any one, indeed, can
see from his early compositions, had been on severely orthodox lines.  Strauss
himself has told us that until 1885, when he made the acquaintance of
Alexander Ritter, he had been "brought up in a strictly classical way," on
nothing but Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, and that only after 1885 did he
attain, via Mendelssohn, to Chopin and Schumann, and then to Brahms.  The
evidence of this is writ large on all his earlier works: the Funf
Clavierstucke, op. 3 (1881); the Pianoforte Sonata, op. 5 (1881); the Sonata
for Violoncello and Piano, op. 6 (1882-3); the Serenade for wind instruments,
op. 7 (1882-3); the Violin Concerto, op. 8 (1882-3); the "Stimmungsbilder" for
piano, op. 9 (1882-3); and the Concerto for French horn, op. 11 (1883-4).

[See As A Boy: Richard's musical ability showed itself at an early age.]

     After leaving the University Strauss spent the winter of 1883-4 in
Berlin, where, as at Munich, he was unusually fortunate in getting his
youthful works performed.  A Concert Overture in C minor (still unpublished)
was played by the Court Orchestra under Radecke.  In Berlin he attracted the
attention of Hans von Bulow, who conceived for the young man one of those
sudden enthusiasms in which the career of Bulow was so prolific.  He placed
Strauss's Serenade on the programmes of his tour with the Meiningen Orchestra.
Besides encouraging Strauss as a composer, he seems to have realized that he
had a gift for conducting.  In the spring of 1885, at Bulow's invitation,
Strauss conducted, at a concert of the Meiningen Orchestra in Munich, a
four-movement Suite of his own for wind instruments, that has not yet been
published. ^*  He gave it without any rehearsal, a fact which points to unusual
confidence on Bulow's part, either in Strauss or, which is more probable, in
the wind players of his orchestra.  Bulow, however, had evidently a high
opinion of the young man, for on 1 October of the same year he engaged him as
assistant "Musikdirektor" under himself at Meiningen.  Here Strauss played,
under the conductorship of Bulow, the C minor Pianoforte Concerto of Mozart,
and conducted his own Symphony in F minor (op. 12), which had been written in
1883-4, and of which the first performance had been given in New York on 13
December, 1884, by Theodore Thomas.  His other compositions of this period
include the Piano Quartet (op. 13), written in 1883-4 - with which he won the
prize offered by the Berlin Tonkunstler-Verein - and the Wandrers Sturmlied
(1884-5).

[Footnote *: "This," says Mr. James Huneker in his article on Strauss in
"Overtones," "must be the grand Suite in B flat, misleadingly numbered opus
14, the same opus number as the Sturmlied.  It is scored for thirteen wind
instruments, and has been heard in London.  The introduction and entire fourth
movement are said to be the best.  It is early Strauss."]

     Although what we now regard as the real Strauss had not yet appeared in
his music, the style of the young man of twenty, as shown in the Symphony in F
minor, the Piano Quartet, and the Wandrers Sturmlied, had changed considerably
from that of the composer of the still earlier works.  In these three works,
and more especially in the Wandrers Sturmlied, most people see the influence
of Brahms, in whom Bulow had probably interested him.  A still stronger
influence was now to come into his life.  According to Strauss himself the
turning-point of his career was his friendship with Alexander Ritter
(1833-96), a man of many parts - violinist, composer, litterateur, and
music-seller.  One of Strauss's German biographers, Dr. Erich Urban, thinks
that the part played by Ritter in the development of the composer has been
exaggerated; at most, he thinks, Ritter could only have given the final
impulse to tendencies that had long been slumbering in Strauss.  Ritter, he
says, was "ein verworrener Denker, ein unklarer Kopf" ("a confused thinker, an
unclear intelligence").  He holds that it was more probably Bulow who applied
the torch of modernity to Strauss's smouldering faculties; and he quotes a
remark of the composer to the effect that in October, 1885, he attended daily
the rehearsals of the Meiningen Orchestra, at which he was initiated by Bulow
into the art of conducting "in his [Bulow's] sense and in that of Wagner." We
may take it for granted that Bulow brought the young composer into closer
touch with many of the main currents of modern music.  At the same time we are
bound to accept Strauss's own declaration of how much he owed to Ritter.  He
was, according to Strauss, a well-read man, particularly in philosophy.  He
had married a niece of Wagner, and was an ardent apostle of the ideas of
Wagner and Liszt and the so-called "New German" school, with its ideal of
"Musik als Ausdruck." "His influence," says Strauss, "was in the nature of the
storm-wind.  He urged me on to the development of the poetic, the expressive
in music, as exemplified in the works of Liszt, Wagner, and Berlioz.  My
symphonic fantasia, Aus Italien, is the connecting link between the old and
the new methods." Erich Urban, however, doggedly declines to see any influence
of Ritter in Aus Italien, the Burleske, the Violin Sonata (op. 18), or the six
songs that form op. 19.

[Hear On His Teacher]
A well-read man, particularly in philosophy.

     When Bulow left Meiningen, in November, 1885, Strauss became his
successor.  He occupied this post until 1 April, 1886.  The April and May of
that year he spent mostly in Rome and Naples; it was from this Italian journey
that Aus Italien (op. 16) sprang.  The work was first performed at Munich, in
the spring of 1887, under Strauss himself.  On 1 August, 1886, he was
appointed third Kapellmeister at the Munich Opera, under Levi and Fischer, a
position he gave up on 31 July, 1889.  On 1 October, 1889, he became assistant
Kapellmeister at Weimar, under Lassen.  By this time he had "found himself" as
a composer, as the bare enumeration of the works written between 1885 and 1889
will show.  Aus Italien was followed in 1886 by the six songs published as op.
17, the first of which - "Seitdem dein Aug' in meines schaute," with its more
refined passion and its greater freedom of handling - has only to be compared
with one of the earlier songs, such as the popular "Zueignung" of op. 10, for
the difference between the Strauss of eighteen and the Strauss of twenty-two -
the pre-Ritter and the post-Ritter Strauss - to be at once apparent.  In 1887
came the vigorous Violin Sonata (op. 18), which, youthful as it still is in
comparison with Strauss's later work, inhabits a different world from the
Violin Concerto of 1882-3 (op. 8).  Passing over the songs of op. 19 (1887),
op. 21 (1888), and op. 22 (1886-7), it need only be mentioned that op. 20 was
the tone-poem Don Juan (1888, first performance in Berlin under Bulow), op.
23, Macbeth, ^* and op. 24, Tod und Verklarung (1889, first performance
Eisenach, 1890), for it to be quite evident that in the two or three years
immediately succeeding 1885 Strauss had left far behind him the sober
classical ideals of his boyhood, and was well on the way to becoming the
audacious revolutionary who so startled the musical world between 1895 - the
year of Till Eulenspiegel - and 1898 - the year of Ein Heldenleben.

[Footnote *: Macbeth, though it bears a later opus number than Don Juan, is in
reality Strauss's first tone-poem.  It was written in the summer of 1887, and
given under Bulow in Berlin, then revised, and published after Don Juan.  It
was first performed in Weimar in 1890 in its revised form.]

     On leaving Munich, in October, 1889, as we have seen, Strauss went to
Weimar, where he remained as conductor until the beginning of June, 1894.
Among the operas he produced there were two short works of his mentor,
Alexander Ritter - "Der faule Hans" and "Wem die Krone?" - while as conductor
of the Liszt Society at Leipzig he did a good deal for modern music. Meanwhile
he had made his first experiment in opera.  An inflammation of the lungs and a
general breakdown through overwork had sent him, in the spring of 1892, on a
year's tour to Greece, Egypt, and Sicily in search of health.  At Cairo, on 29
December, 1892, he began the first act of Guntram, finishing it at Luxor on 27
February of the following year.  The second act was completed at Villa
Blandini, Ramacca, Sicily, on 4 June, 1893; and the third at Marquartstein,
Upper Bavaria, on 5 September, 1893.  Strauss himself conducted the first
performance at Weimar, on 12 May 1894.  Heinrich Zeller was the Guntram, and
Pauline de Ahna - the daughter of the Bavarian general Adolf de Ahna, - who
later on became the wife of the composer, was the Freihild.  The work had no
great success with the public, partly, no doubt, because of the palpable
traces of Wagner in both the music and the libretto, which latter, by the way,
is Strauss's own.

     From Weimar he returned in October, 1894, to Munich, this time as first
Kapellmeister.  During the winter of 1894-5 he also conducted the Berlin
Philharmonic concerts in succession to Bulow, while in the summer of 1894 he
had conducted the first performance of Tannhauser that had ever been given at
Bayreuth.  Pauline de Ahna, whom he married shortly afterwards, was the
Elisabeth.  The years that followed were busy ones for Strauss.  In 1895 he
conducted concerts in Budapest, Leipzig, and other towns; in 1896 and 1897 he
conducted at Brussels, Moscow, etc., and at the Dusseldorf Festival; in 1897
he visited Amsterdam, London, Barcelona, Brussels, Hamburg, and Paris; and in
1898 Zurich and Madrid.  In October, 1898, he left Munich to take up the post,
which he yet holds, of conductor at the Berlin Royal Opera.  His duties at
Weimar, Munich, and Berlin necessarily brought him into contact with music of
all schools, and it is satisfactory to note that he can conduct a trifle like
the "Fledermaus" of the younger Johann Strauss with the same gusto as
"Tristan" or Die Meistersinger" or "The Barber of Baghdad." The catholicity of
his taste is further shown by the fact that he was one of the first to see the
beauty of Humperdinck's "Hansel und Gretel," and the first to give that
delightful work to the world, in December, 1893, during his Kapellmeistership
at Weimar.  As he was at that time thinking out his Also sprach Zarathustra,
which, all things considered, is the most revolutionary work of our
generation, it is evident that the most intense absorption in his own
intellectual world is not incompatible with the warmest sympathy with
musicians of radically different outlooks.

[See Marquardtstein: Richard Strauss' Country Home.]

     In the midst of all the heavy work entailed by this conducting and
travelling he found time to write that series of orchestral works which
defined once for all his position in the history of the music of the
nineteenth century.  Till Eulenspiegel (op. 28) followed close upon the heels
of Guntram; it was written in 1894, and received its first performance at
Cologne, under Wullner, in 1895.  From there it quickly made its way to almost
every musical city in Germany - except his birthplace, Munich.  Only two songs
separate Till Eulenspiegel from Also sprach Zarathustra (op. 30), which was
first performed under Strauss himself at Frankfort, on 27 November, 1895.  Don
Quixote (op. 35) followed in 1897, and Ein Heldenleben (op. 40) in 1898; and
at the age of thirty-four Strauss was the most talked-of musician in the
world.  He had already carried the typical modern art-form, the symphonic
poem, as far beyond anything of the kind that his predecessors had written, as
Wagner in Tristan had swung himself beyond the ken of all earlier or
contemporary composers of opera.  His nine following opus numbers comprise
nothing but songs and a few male-voice choruses.  His next large work was the
opera Feuersnoth (op. 50), produced at Dresden on 21 November, 1901.  This was
succeeded by "Das Tal" (op. 51), a song for bass voice and orchestra, and a
choral work, Taillefer (op. 52); then, in 1904, came the much-discussed
Symphonia Domestica (op. 53, first performance in New York, 21 March, 1904,
under Strauss).  One would have thought that the climax of excitement about
him had been reached long ago, but the production of his third opera, Salome
(op. 54), in Dresden, on 9 December, 1905, roused a fiercer storm of
controversy than ever.  Since Salome he has produced nothing on a large scale.
Opus 55 is a Bardengesang (1906) for male-voice chorus and orchestra; op. 56 a
set of six songs; and op. 57 two marches.  A fourth opera, Electra, has not
yet seen the light.

     Strauss's personal acquaintance with England dates from 1897.  August
Manns had already given his Till Eulenspiegel at the Crystal Palace on 21
March, 1896, and Also sprach Zarathustra on 6 March, 1897.  On 7 December,
1897, at a Wagner concert given by Mr. Schulz-Curtius in the Queen's Hall,
London, Strauss conducted his own Till Eulenspiegel and Tod and Verklarung,
this being the first English performance of the latter work.  His music,
however, spread slowly here; even in November, 1902, the "Musical Times" could
say, with unconscious irony, that "the name of Richard Strauss is gradually
becoming known in England." On 1 February, 1902, the love-scene from
Feuersnoth was given by Mr. Wood at Queen's Hall.

     Some months later, at the Lower Rhenish Festival, held at Dusseldorf in
May, Strauss had made a remark that had unexpectedly wide-reaching
consequences.  Elgar's Gerontius had just received, under the baton of Julius
Buths, a performance that made amends for the inadequate rendering it had had
at the Birmingham Festival of 1900.  After the official toasts had all been
proposed Strauss surprised every one by spontaneously proposing another; "I
raise my glass," he said, "to the welfare and success of the first English
Progressivist, Meister Edward Elgar, and of the young progressive school of
English composers." The remark gave great offence in some quarters in England,
where several estimable composers, who were, however, neither progressive nor
Meisters, felt that the compliment to Elgar was a backhander to themselves.
But Strauss's generous words undoubtedly had much to do with the revival of
Elgar's great work in this country.  At the end of the same month and the
beginning of June, Strauss gave some concerts in London in conjunction with
Herrvon Possart, who recited Tennyson's "Enoch Arden," the composer at the
piano accompanying with his own music (op. 38).  Performances were also given,
under Strauss, of Tod und Verklarung, Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegel, and the
Violin Sonata.  On 12 December, 1902, Mr. Wood gave the first English
performance of Ein Heldenleben.  The critics, where they were not dubious as
to the value of the new work, were mostly rather hostile; but the public took
to it, and Mr. Wood repeated it on 1 January and 28 March, 1903.

     In September, 1902, Tod und Verklarung was given at the Worcester
Festival, this being the first performance of any work of his at an English
festival.  The Sturmlied was given at the Sheffield Festival in October of the
same year.

     In June, 1903, an elaborate Strauss festival, lasting three days, was
held in London.  The fine Amsterdam Orchestra had been engaged; it had the
reputation of playing Strauss's works with especial brilliancy, and Ein
Heldenleben had been dedicated to its conductor, Wilhelm Mengelberg.  Two
performances were given of Also sprach Zarathustra, two of Till Eulenspiegel,
two of Ein Heldenleben, one of Tod und Verklarung, one of Don Juan, one of
Macbeth, and one of Don Quixote, Strauss and Mengelberg sharing the work of
conducting.  Two movements from Aus Italien were also given.  Mr. Wilhelm
Backhaus played the solo part in the Burleske, Mr. John Harrison sang excerpts
from Guntram, and the composer's wife and Mr. Ffrangcon Davies sang a number
of his songs.  The Festival was not a financial success, but it was widely
discussed, and did much to establish Strauss firmly in the English concert
room.  Since then his orchestral compositions have figured regularly on both
London and provincial programmes, and his larger new works, with the
exception, of course, of the operas, have been heard here fairly promptly.
Taillefer was given at the Bristol Festival of October, 1905, and the
Symphonia Domestica received its first English performance under Mr. Wood, on
25 February, 1905.  Don Quixote, too, has been repeated in London, though not
in the provinces; and Strauss himself has paid this country more than one
visit since 1903.  Salome, presumably, we shall never hear on the stage in
England; but the dance from it was played by the New Symphony Orchestra, under
Mr. Fritz Cassirer, at Queen's Hall on 22 November, 1907.  At a concert to be
given at Queen's Hall on 19 March of the present year it was intended that
Strauss should conduct the dance and two long vocal excerpts from Salome, -
the great scene between Salome and Jochanaan, and the final scene of the
opera; but the concert fell through owing to a disagreement between the
Queen's Hall authorities and the German "Genossenschaft" that manages the
financial affairs of the composers belonging to it.

     It will be seen that Strauss's life, so far as external events are
concerned, has been comparatively uneventful; it is mainly a record of
strenuous labour as composer and conductor.  When we survey the already
enormous mass of his music we feel that this alone is enough work for one man
to have done, and when we think of the further great strain upon his time and
his strength involved in his constant conducting and his travelling - for he
has toured the world from New York to Moscow - we wonder that he has not
broken down long ago.  Fortunately for him he keeps clear, for the most part,
of the literary side of music.  He has edited a German edition of Berlioz's
"Treatise on Instrumentation," has written a magazine article or two, and is
the editor of a little series of books - "Die Musik" is the general title of
the series - most of which would be highly interesting if only the atrocious
German typography of them permitted any one who respects his eyesight to read
them.  The latest volume of the series is upon Strauss's old friend, Alexander
Ritter; the author is Siegmund von Hausegger.

     Of Strauss as a conductor only those who have heard him frequently, and
in all kinds of music, have a right to speak.  The readings he has given of
his own works in England have been highly personal; in Also sprach Zarathustra
and Ein Heldenleben, for example, he stresses the occasional freakishnesses of
the music more than the majority of other conductors do.  In his operatic
conducting, however, he is said to pay less attention to detail and more to
breadth of general effect; and it is claimed for him that he is both broad in
his sympathies and conscientious in the discharge of his duties, giving the
same care, for example, to an opera by Lortzing as he does to one by Wagner.