Chapter XII: Appendix: Wagner, Berlioz, Liszt, and Mr. Ashton Ellis 305 (9)

I call this his greatest work, because it is the one in which his qualities of realist and humanist come to their finest flower. It has all the fervour of _Don Juan_, and all the humour of _Till Eulenspiegel_, with a technique still more amazing than that of either of these works, and that riper feeling that could only come to him with the process of the years. I would rank the _Don Quixote_ higher even than _Also sprach Zarathustra_, because of this sensation that it gives us of the enormous fund of sincere emotion that underlies all Strauss's audacity and cleverness, and that never leaves him even in his moments of most reckless humour. Certainly _Also sprach Zarathustra_ is a marvellous work; no such overwhelming picture of man and the universe has ever before been unfolded to our eyes in music; it almost makes the world-philosophy of Wagner seem, in comparison, like the bleat of evangelical orthodoxy. But it is in the _Don Quixote_ that Strauss is most really and truly himself and most thoroughly human. It is here also that every trace of other men's style has definitely disappeared, for even in _Also sprach Zarathustra_ we seem at times to catch the voice of Liszt. The _Don Quixote_ marks the final rupture of the realist and the romantic schools in music. I say nothing here of its technique, though that alone is sufficient to make one ask oneself whether it is possible for music to develop further than this. Nowhere, outside the work of glorious old Bach, is there such a combination in music of inexhaustible fertility of imagination and the most rigid austerity in the choice of material. Description would avail nothing for these aspects of _Don Quixote_; every student must revel in the riches of the work on his own account. But when we consider its more human qualities, the _Don Quixote_ must be pronounced an epoch-making work, both in its form and its psychology. It is not a symphonic poem, but a series of variations upon practically three themes--Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, and Dulcinea; and for wit, humour, pathos, and humanism there is nothing like it in the whole library of music. Certainly to any one who knows Strauss's music of _Don Quixote_, the story of Cervantes is henceforth inconceivable without it; the story itself, indeed, has not half the humour and the profound sadness which is infused into it by Strauss. What he has done in this work is to inaugurate the period of the novel in music. We have had our immortal lyrists, our sculptors, our dramatists, our builders of exquisite temples; we now come to the writers of fiction, to our Flaubert and Tourgeniev and Dostoievski. And here we see the subtle fitness of things that has deprived Strauss of those purely lyrical qualities, whose absence, as I have previously argued, makes it impossible for him to be an absolute creator of shapes of pure self-sustained beauty. His type of melody is now seen to be not a failing but a magnificent gift. It is the prose of music--a grave, flexible, eloquent prose, the one instrument in the world that is suitable for the prose fiction in music that it is Strauss's destiny to develop. His style is nervous, compact, sinuous, as good prose should be, which, as it is related, through its subject-matter, more responsibly to life than is poetry, must relinquish some of the fine abandonment of song, and find its compensation in a perfect blend, a perfect compromise, of logic and rapture, truth and ideality. "I can conceive," says Flaubert in one of his letters, "a style which should be beautiful; which some one will write one of these days, in ten years or in ten centuries; which shall be rhythmical as verse, precise as the language of science, and with undulations, modulations as of a violoncello, flashes of fire; a style which would enter into the idea like the stroke of a stiletto; a style on which our thoughts would sail over gleaming surfaces, as it were, in a boat with a good wind aft. It must be said that prose is born of yesterday; verse is the form _par excellence_ of the ancient literatures. All the prosodic combinations have been made; but those of prose are still to make."

No better description, it seems to me, could be had of the musical style of Strauss, with its constant adaptation to the emotional and intellectual atmosphere of the moment, and its appropriateness to the realistic suggestion of character and _milieu_ which is his mission in music. His qualities are homogeneous; he is not a Wagner _manqué_ nor an illegitimate son of Liszt, but the creator of a new order of things in music, the founder of a new type of art. The only test of a literature being alive is, as Dr. Georg Brandes says, whether it gives rise to new problems, new questionings. Judged by this test, the art of Strauss is the main sign of new and independent life in music since Wagner; for it perpetually spurs us on to fresh problems of æsthetics, of psychology, and of form.

IV

It is not difficult to understand the attitude of musical purists towards Strauss, and of many others who are not altogether purists. There is something provocative, defiant, almost repellent, in the power of the man's genius. He is so enormously strong, so proudly self-confident, that he joys in flouting the world in the face as it has never been flouted before. His whole career is a testimony to how far courage and resource can carry a man. According to all known precedents, he ought to have struggled for years, vainly endeavouring to get a bare hearing; when he was actually performed he should have been crushed under critical ridicule and poisoned with critical venom; he should have had a ceaseless fight with singers, with players, with opera-houses, with publishers, with concert-givers, and have perished miserably, a martyr to an impossible ideal. For sheer indifference to other people's opinion, for sheer determination to go his own way without regard for all the time-honoured conventions, there is simply nothing like him in the history of music. Yet his career has been one of unbroken triumph. At the age of forty he is not only recognised as the most astonishing of European musicians, but there is no demand of his, no matter how imperious, that people do not gladly hasten to fulfil. In _Zarathustra_ he apparently reaches the limits of what can be demanded from a human orchestra; yet in _Don Quixote_, and again in _Ein Heldenleben_, he strains their breaking sinews to a still higher tension; while in the _Symphonia domestica_ he treats them and us with a superb, tyrannic insolence. Never before has an orchestra of sixty-two strings, two harps, a piccolo, three flutes, two oboes, an oboe d'amore, a cor anglais, five clarinets, five bassoons, four saxophones, eight horns, four trumpets, three trombones, a bass tuba, four kettledrums, a triangle, a tambourine, a glockenspiel, cymbals, and a big drum, been required to describe a day in the life of a baby; never before have the energies of over a hundred able-bodied men been bent to such a task. He tunes his strings below the normal limit just as he likes; he employs obsolete instruments, and others that are never used in concert-orchestras; he multiplies difficulties, and, by reason of the many rehearsals required, makes performances of his works enormously expensive affairs. Yet he does it all with sublime impunity. An Oriental potentate riding his horse contemptuously over the prostrate bodies of a half-adoring, half-resentful populace, is the only image that will justly describe him in his forceful, irresistible career. The gods have indeed smiled on Strauss. Much of his success, or of his power to command success, may no doubt be due to financial causes; he has never had to fight the world with an empty purse and empty stomach. But still he is the most remarkable phenomenon the musical world has ever seen; no composer ever insulted us one quarter so much without having the life drubbed out of him.

He is evidently a man of enormous nervous energy. You can see it, for one thing, in the style of his melodies. They are remarkable for their huge leaps, the great arcs they traverse, the wide distances between their parts--all pointing to great waves of nervous energy that cannot be confined within the narrow bounds of the ordinary melody. Occasionally it does him rather a disservice; it becomes his master instead of his servant. There is really no need for this incessant piling-up of more and more sound in the orchestra; its one sufficient condemnation is that frequently no result comes out commensurate with the huge means that have to be employed. Thousands of pages of our modern music would be equally great, equally moving, with a vastly smaller expenditure of effort. A man like Strauss takes an exuberant joy, the joy of a healthy athlete doing difficult feats, in weaving a musical texture that is a marvel of ingenious technique. It looks, and really is, wonderful on paper; but there is no gainsaying that precisely the same effect could often be achieved by much simpler means. Now and again we find ourselves saying that line after line might have been struck out of the score without any of the final effect being lost. Nay, Strauss's absorption in the pure joy of scoring occasionally leads him into errors of technique that a smaller man would have escaped. In the dance in _Zarathustra_, for example, his excessive subdivision of the strings merely results in the waltz-theme coming out far too feebly. His own specification at the beginning of the score is for sixteen first violins (to consider this section alone). In the waltz he divides them into (1) first desk, (2) second, third, fourth, and fifth desks. Then he divides the first desk again, giving part of them an arpeggio figure, and the remainder a theme in two parts, involving a further subdivision of this small remainder. The result is that the melody is shorn of all its power. He has marked it _forte_, but a _forte_ is impossible, even with the proper toning down of the rest of the strings. There is no earthly need for such a page as this. The whole strength of the strings is frittered away upon things that do not come out, and would be quite unimportant if they did come out; and the really important theme is shorn of all its impressiveness. There is really no necessity for a great deal of the orchestral complexity in which Strauss now and then delights. It is not essential to the proper presentation of his ideas; it puts an unnecessary strain on the time and the nerves of the orchestra; and it tempts young admirers to go and do likewise, with results absolutely fatal to their chance of getting a performance from any conductor.

It may be that we are only beating the air in calling Strauss's attention to facts like these; it may be that without his defects we should not have his qualities, that the turbulent flood of energy that leads him into occasional extravagances of scoring is only part of the greater flood that makes his inspiration the colossal, overwhelming thing it is. All through the man's brain there is a touch of disorder, a strain of something or other abnormal, that makes it hard for him to work at anything for ten minutes without an irresistible desire surging up in him to deface it. He works at the picture like the soul of inspiration itself; then suddenly a saturnine whim shoots along his nerves, and he makes a long erratic stroke with the brush that comes perilously near to destroying the harmony of the whole thing. An able critic once expressed it to me, after a performance of _Ein Heldenleben_, that Strauss as a composer was something like Rubinstein as a pianist--he cannot go through anything of any length without doing at least one foolish thing in it. Roughly speaking he was right. Shall we say that in every great musician there is a flaw in the mental structure that has to show in one way or another, and that those are lucky in whom it does not show in their music? So much folly, that is, is given to each of them, and it has to come out somewhere. In Wagner it came out in the prose works; they were a beneficent scheme of Providence for sweeping the brain free of its cobwebs, and leaving the purified instrument in all the better condition for its music. Beethoven's madness came out in his private life, again leaving the brain working in music in perfect ease and balance. Strauss does not write prose works like Wagner, and does not, like Beethoven, pour the water all over himself when he is washing his hands, or use a lady's candle-snuffers as a tooth-pick. He is distressingly normal in these respects; and lacking such safety valves for the little bit of folly there is in him, it unfortunately comes out in his music. In the earlier days he could give full rein to his humour, his power of characterisation, with the minimum of desire to irritate his hearer for the pure love of the thing; in _Till Eulenspiegel_, for example, it is almost all pure delight, a flow of wit and humour that only for a moment or two is interrupted by the antics of the mischievous schoolboy. But after that the tendency grew seriously on Strauss to mar his picture by some piece of malicious folly, to thrust his head through the canvas and grin at the public, or to place his thumb to his nose and extend his fingers at them in a derisive flourish.

It is in _Ein Heldenleben_ that this tendency is seen at its worst. With all its great beauties and its titanic powers, it remains finally less satisfactory than it easily might have been. It is not all bathed in the one light; the picture has been seen disconnectedly; it is an attempt at the marriage of contrarieties. The great question is, What does _Ein Heldenleben_ purport to represent? Is it meant for a purely objective painting of a hero--a representation, as it were, of the hero, _per se_--or is it intended, in parts at least, to draw the hearer's attention to the personality of Strauss himself? The official explanation of the work--authorised, we are told, by the composer--is that _Ein Heldenleben_ is meant as a kind of pendant to _Don Quixote_. There he had sketched an individual figure, "whose vain search after heroism leads to insanity." Here he was concerned to present "not a single poetic or historical figure, but rather a more general and free ideal of great and manly heroism"; and the idea that the hero of the poem is anywhere Strauss himself is scouted vigorously.

Now, as regards the general handling of the music, it is, I think, because Strauss has had this generalised picture in his mind that he has here come to grief. _Don Quixote_ is such a masterpiece of humanism precisely because Strauss has confined himself to a strictly human figure. You can psychologise both broadly and minutely about a human character, but it is extremely difficult to make a pure abstraction interesting. At every step you are likely to fall into either the bombastic or the commonplace. Especially in music should an abstraction be treated as broadly as possible; the only hope of salvation lies in avoiding an absurd contrast between the particular and the general. This is precisely what Strauss, with all his genius, has not succeeded in avoiding; and when we come to examine his scheme a little more closely, we have every reason to be dissatisfied with the authorised version of its purport. In the first place, this hero in the abstract, this representative of "a more general and free ideal of great and manly heroism," becomes less and less a generalised type as the work goes on, and at last--in spite of what the inspired commentators may say--strikes a great many of us as being nothing more nor less than a musician--rather a singular narrowing, surely, of the conception of a hero; and this musician has a curious resemblance to Strauss himself. No official disclaimers can get rid of those twenty or twenty-five quotations from Strauss's own earlier works which figure as "the Hero's Works of Peace" in the authorised analysis. The ingenious remark of the analyst, that "quoting salient features from his most important works, he lets us see that the experiences of the hero have also been his own," is really the idlest trifling. When a man sets out to describe a typical hero, a "general and free ideal of great and manly heroism," he does not, as a rule, give as samples of that universal hero's activity a bunch of quotations from almost every work he himself has already written. To have done this seriously would have argued a ludicrous egoism in Strauss; and, in spite of the official story, I prefer to believe that he was not quite so absurd as this. We are here face to face with that curious muddling of the purpose, that perverse desire to stick his own head through the canvas, that is occasionally so characteristic of him. He cannot resist the impulse at once to exhibit his marvellous technique, and to fling a pot of paint in the public's face, as Ruskin said of Whistler; and the result is this wonderfully clever but psychologically unjustifiable rhapsody upon himself, inserted in the middle of what is meant to be a purely objective portrait of a hero. It is not easy, again, to understand the significance or see the appropriateness of the section entitled "The Hero's Battlefield." If ever there was anything in music that could be said to aim at suggesting, crudely and melodramatically, the horror and the nervous excitement of a physical conflict between armed hosts, it is this section, with its appalling and hideous racket, that sounds like strenuous boiler-riveting. But _musicians_ do not fight battles of this kind, surely; and a scheme that represents a hero whose "works of peace" are purely intellectual becomes nonsense when it depicts him fighting like a Hooligan among Hooligans, bludgeoning and being bludgeoned.

It is all due, of course, to this muddling up of the two plans--that of a very definite hero whom Strauss knows very well, and that of a generalised and indefinite hero whom he finds himself compelled to describe in the biggest superlatives. The two conceptions will not equate, will not blend; the one is always trying to destroy the other. All through the work one is dimly conscious of an absence of homogeneity, of failure to make the general scheme as coherent and convincing as it might be; though the man's genius is so titanic that it almost kills our criticism while we are listening to the work. It is a pity, too, that he should sacrifice for a moment the nobility of the general scheme in order to turn aside for a trifling _jeu d'esprit_, in the notorious section that treats of the hero's antagonists. There is cleverness in the characterisation; Strauss is painting the portraits of individual critics who have annoyed him, and those who have seen him, at rehearsal, suggest to the eyes of the players the different types he is satirising, must needs laugh even against their own will. But the section as a whole is a monstrosity; and it is lamentable to see a great genius turn aside from that mighty statue that he has just begun to carve, in order to vent his personal feeling against his personal antagonists. It is simply a crime against art.

V

It is in _Ein Heldenleben_, more than anywhere else, that we have the defects of Strauss's qualities. He is of the type that, masterly as its self-control generally is, cannot refrain at times from becoming defiantly extravagant. It all goes along with his enormous vital energy, that energy which is met with in only one or two men in every century, and that invariably prompts its possessor now and then to the commission of something or other we would rather have had left undone. There is in Strauss something of the _débordement_ of Rabelais, a lust of existence and of apprehension too big to be kept within normal bounds. There is something in him, too, of Hokusai--that colossal genius whose eager spirit seemed to try to fill every corner, every crevice, of the visible world; something of the Japanese artist's interest in all forms of life, something too of the same occasional corruption of the imagination--as in the unfinished series of prints entitled _The Hundred Tales_, where the artist, out of the very excess of his power and ardour, turns life into a hideous, terrifying mockery of itself. Strauss is cosmic in his understanding and his sympathies, but not as men like Goethe and Leonardo are, whose vision is always clear, and whose energies are always held in check by another energy higher than themselves; like Rabelais, like Hokusai, like Goya, there come to him moments when the flood of life within him overflows, and he is hardly master of the strange shapes that issue from his brain. A positive artistic rage seizes him, and he embraces life with an ardour that is cruel, brutal--a passion that has a touch of Sadism in it.

If this enormous sensitiveness to everything that goes on in the world, and this quickness of reaction of the imagination upon it all, are answerable for Strauss's occasional lapses from good taste, they account also for the profounder and more vital qualities of his art--his humour and his humanism, the qualities that make _Feuersnot_ so delightful and _Don Quixote_ so exceedingly great. London treated the latter work unkindly at its solitary hearing of it; it is, indeed, too vast, too many-sided, to be understood at first acquaintance. One critic called it "ugly, laboured, and eccentric"; another wrote that it "contains more sheer ugliness than any other score written by any responsible person of whom we have ever heard, or whose work we have ever studied.... Everything seems in _Don Quixote_ to be discordant for the sheer sake of discord.... We condemn that work from every musicianly point of view; the thing is an artistic arrogance, an attempt to make the best out of the worst, ... utterly and completely a failure; it has no recommendation of beauty, not even the recommendation of fine construction; it is a hopeless piece of exaggerated and intentional cleverness." Well, a significant thing happened on the very night on which _Don Quixote_ created such heartburning. This frightfully complex work, which was absolutely unknown to more than perhaps ten people in the audience, and was consequently misunderstood almost from first to last, was followed by the much earlier _Tod und Verklärung_, a work which itself, a few years ago, was looked upon as perilously near folly and ugliness. Anyone who now thinks _Tod und Verklärung_ a tough nut to crack is looked upon as a hopeless Conservative in music, so very quickly does the world move in these matters. Even the _Times_ said that after _Don Quixote_ the _Tod und Verklärung_ sounded quite sane and normal, or words to that effect. We know how _Also sprach Zarathustra_ was received in 1897, and how accustomed we have grown to it since then, on the strength of some three or four performances; we know how many people who shied nervously at the first performance of _Ein Heldenleben_ now take it as easily as a cat laps milk. In the face of facts like these, is it not somewhat hasty to bespatter the _Don Quixote_ with opprobrious epithets on the strength of just one performance? People have blundered over Strauss before, and been compelled to eat their words when they came to know him better; they have run away from the ogre like frightened children, only to discover long after that the supposed ogre was a kindly and well-disposed person, of something more than ordinary human build perhaps, but still on the plane of normal, not sub-normal nor super-normal, humanity. I say with confidence that they will in time admit that they have gone grievously astray over _Don Quixote_. It lies on the mere surface of the matter that some parts of it are ravishingly beautiful; you have only to play for yourself on the piano the death music, or the Don's long eulogy of the knightly life, to feel the very heart leap within you. If this is not surpassingly great music there is no music in the world worthy of the name. Of other parts the beauty will be perceived when the work is better known; and the _Don Quixote_ will then be recognised to be in some ways the profoundest, noblest thing Strauss has ever done. It is, of course, extraordinarily realistic in its imitations at times, and I can imagine how the sheep and the wind-machine jar on the nerves of ordinarily sensitive people. But you must just laugh at these things and pass them by, take them as a piece of deliberate musical impertinence, and laugh with the composer, not at him. It is really a gratuitous assumption that Strauss is a fool because he has given free wing to his _diablerie_ here and there; he knows as well as any one the precise value of all this kind of thing, but he apparently claims that once or twice in a lifetime it is worth doing for the pure fun of it. We must first of all get the right point of view if we are to understand _Don Quixote_. It is all set in a strange, mad atmosphere; the folly that hovers round it is part of the psychology of the piece; and it is the perfect transmutation of the mental processes of Quixote into tone that makes the work so wonderful, so unique. If a man is not smitten through and through by the pathos of section after section of the piece, I can only say, for my part, that he has not grasped the real significance of the work. Frequent hearing of it will make the extraordinarily original musical tissue quite familiar to men's ears, and when this has been done there will be no bar to the comprehension of the profoundly human psychology of a masterpiece that only Strauss could have written. The score is a treasure-house of true and noble things, which only come to you in full force when you have steeped yourself in its strange atmosphere. Take, for example, the variation immediately preceding the Finale, representing the weary homeward ride of Quixote and Sancho after the Don's defeat by the Knight of the White Moon. In these long descending wails of the orchestra you have all the anguish, all the disillusionment of the poor knight painted with an expressiveness, a fidelity, that sets one thinking of visual as well as auditory things. He illustrates the scene as consummately as a pictorial artist could do, and at the same time throws over it the melting melancholy that music alone among the arts can express. You can see these poor broken creatures, with bowed heads, pacing wearily along on steeds no less sorry, no less bruised than themselves. The whole thing breathes physical and mental fatigue and moral despair. The score of _Don Quixote_ is full of a human quality that we rarely get to such perfection anywhere else, even in Strauss; and London lost a golden opportunity in not taking the work to its heart at once. As it was, the more obvious bits of realism in it revolted a good many people, and left them with insufficient patience to seek beneath the better kind of humour for the pathos that underlies it; while the extraordinary complexity of the musical tissue was all against a comprehension of the work at a first hearing.

What makes the _Don Quixote_ so great a work is, in a word, the wise and tender humanity of its humour. We can put aside, if we like, all the wonderful witchery of its technique, its extraordinary graphic power, its exhilarating and amusing imitations of reality--for there is here a descriptive sense surpassing in its manifestations _Till Eulenspiegel_ and _Ein Heldenleben_ at their best. The wise man, who accepts with thankfulness all that music can give him, will not reject all this with a sneer and a condescending remark about music "confining itself to its proper province." The day has gone by for primitive academic æsthetics of that kind. But I do not want to lay stress upon this side of _Don Quixote_, simply because there is infinitely more in the work than this. It represents musical character-sketching brought to a finer point of perfection than can be met with anywhere outside the magic world of Wagner. But it differs from Wagner's drawing in that it is less opulent, more concise, more sharply conceived; it is wholly appropriate to the sketching block upon which the characters are drawn, just as Wagner's heroic figures depend upon and are justified by the huge canvas and the gorgeous range of colour that he is able to devote to them. The _Don Quixote_ puts us in mind of first-rate book-illustration; we could hardly see the characters more distinctly, both in themselves and in relation to their surroundings, if they were set before us in black and white.

And how tender the drawing is, how exquisitely human is the feeling for these two poor tragic-comic actors! It is this that finally makes the work so precious--its unfailing pity, its intuitive avoidance of anything that would make it simply unthinking comedy. Strauss's Sancho is very humorous, but your laughter at him is always softened with tears; while the portrait of Quixote has an added touch of pathos in that it invariably suggests the spare, worn frame of the poor, middle-aged knight. It is true in this as in every other respect. His love-singing is that of a middle-aged man; the pitiful sorrow that envelops the ride homeward after his defeat is that of middle-age; the knight is broken, disillusioned, as only men can be whose physical as well as mental forces have passed their prime. For my part, I can no longer think of Cervantes's story without Strauss's music, just as I cannot think of Goethe's _Erl King_ without the music of Schubert, or of the _Lorelei_ without the music of Liszt.

"The German literary laugh," says Mr. Meredith, in his _Essay on Comedy_, "like the timed awakenings of their Barbarossa in the hollows of the Untersberg, is infrequent, and rather monstrous--never a laugh of men and women in concert. It comes of unrefined abstract fancy, grotesque or grim, or gross, like the peculiar humours of their little earthmen. Spiritual laughter they have not yet attained to." So much may be said, I think, of some of Strauss's laughter. Here and there--in _Ein Heldenleben_, for example--it seems to come from the dry and wizened throat of the "little earthman"; it is not yet broadly and deeply human, not yet cosmopolitan in its appeal. His humour on occasions like this is very like Jean Paul's; you hardly know whether he is laughing with you or at you--perhaps he does not quite know himself. But in _Don Quixote_ you have the philosophic laughter of the great humanist. It is not to be found there only among Strauss's works. It gave warmth and pathos to _Till Eulenspiegel_--for wonderful humoresque as that is, its informing spirit is something much more complex and much more pity-moving than the idly humorous. We have assimilated only half of _Till Eulenspiegel_ if we see nothing but _diablerie_ in it. But it is in _Don Quixote_ that the blending of tears and laughter is most perfect; and I, for my part, would gladly sacrifice _Ein Heldenleben_ for this, were I compelled to make the choice, just as I would relinquish the epic and dramatic grandeur of _Die Götterdämmerung_ if I might have left to me _Die Meistersinger_, with its perpetual truth, its perpetual sanity, its perpetual appeal to real men and women in a real world.

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It will be seen from page 252 that the foregoing essay was set up in type before the _Symphonia domestica_ was produced in London in February last. That performance threw a new light on Strauss and his art, and calls for some few words of comment. We need not here go very deeply into the question of how much or how little programme there is in the work. There is a strain of foolishness in Strauss that always prompts him to go through the heavy farce of mystifying his hearers at first. He tells them he prefers not to give them the clue to his literary scheme, but wants them to accept the work as absolute music; this was his tactic, for example, with _Till Eulenspiegel_. All the while he gives one clue after another to his personal friends, till at length sufficient information is gathered to reconstruct the story that he had worked upon; this gradually gets into all the programme books, and then we are able to listen to the work in the only way it _can_ be listened to with any comprehension--with a full knowledge of the programme. So it is now with the _Symphonia domestica_. He has told us that "he wished the work to be judged as absolute music"; he has also told us that "he had in his mind a very definite programme when composing the symphony." Some of his admirers, with a canine fidelity that is positively touching, have tried to reconcile these contradictory positions by ingenious dialectic. That, however, is taking Strauss's whimsies just a little too seriously; it suggests the Shakespearologists of the George Dawson type, who used to tell us that even "if there is anything you do not understand or which you think is wrong in Shakespeare, you may safely conclude that he is right and you are wrong." We need not discuss Strauss's self-contradictions as if they were æsthetic antinomies that could be resolved by an Hegelian dialectic in a more profound harmony; the real explanation is simply that we are dealing with a man of erratic nerves, a musician not very well used to consistent thinking, whose sense of humour sometimes skittishly takes a turning along which it is hardly worth our while to follow it. There is not the faintest doubt that the whole symphony is founded on a very definite programme, and that we shall know it all one of these days, as we now know the minutest details of the programmes of _Till Eulenspiegel_ and _Ein Heldenleben_.

Then the question arises, is the programme of the _Symphonia domestica_ intrinsically interesting? It avowedly illustrates a day in the composer's family life, "and we are told"--to quote Messrs. Pitt and Kalisch, the authors of the admirable Queen's Hall analytical book--"that it illustrates such everyday incidents as a Walk in the Country, the Baby's Evening and Morning Bath, the Striking of the Clock, the Yawns of the Parents when awakened by the Child, and so on." They will have it, however, that there is more in the work than this, and that underneath this "trivial subject" there is "one of far deeper and wider import"--_i.e._ "not so much a day in the life of a particular family as a realisation of the joys and griefs of motherhood and paternity, the gradual growth of the child-soul, and the mutual relationship of children and parents...." But this exalted theory soon comes to grief. It is quite clear that the striking of seven in the evening and again in the morning confines the time of the drama within twelve hours; and on these lines indeed there is some sense in the programme. That is, we see in the first section the parents and child; in the second (the _scherzo_) the joys and diversions of the group, the lullaby, the striking of 7 P.M., and the putting of the child to bed; in the third (the _adagio_), the parents' love-scene and the striking of 7 A.M.; in the fourth (the _finale_) the morning wakening, and--in the double fugue--the dispute between the parents as to the future of the child. This is not a very great scheme, but it is at least comprehensible; mix Teutonic moonshine up with it and it becomes nonsense. Thus Messrs. Pitt and Kalisch, trying to put the best face possible on that stupid noise that is meant to illustrate "the energetic protests of the child when it is first brought into contact with the alien element of cold water" (by the way, _are_ babies usually dumped into cold water?) remark that "if the more idealistic method of interpretation be adopted, it may be taken as a very uncompromising musical picture of the earliest struggles of a new-born soul." But this "idealistic method" will not work. The episode in question occurs just before the clock strikes 7 P.M. It occurs again just before the clock strikes 7 A.M. Are we to understand, then, that the "new-born soul" is born once in the evening and again next morning? This is being "born again" with a vengeance--quick work even in these days of Welsh revivals and Torrey-Alexander missions! No, we must reject the "idealistic method of interpretation," and just settle down to the plain fact that Strauss is painting nothing more ideal than the baby squalling in its bath (hot or cold), just as in other works he has painted Till's death-rattle, the dying shudder of Don Juan, the windmill and the sheep of Don Quixote, and the braying of Sancho Panza's donkey--all frankly realistic things, which we do not attempt to gild with idealistic interpretations.

I lay stress upon these trivial points because it is important that we should know exactly what Strauss's intentions were, for only with a knowledge of them can we judge his symphony as a work of art. It is quite clear then that he has thought it worth while to put about a hundred people to a great deal of trouble and expense in order to suggest the imbecile spectacle of a baby shrieking in its bath; and I think it is time the world protested against so much of its leisure and its funds being taken up with sheer inanities of this kind. In Strauss's previous works there are at most only two or three passages of realism at which I would shy; they have generally been saved for us by some touch of beauty, or humour, or technical cleverness. But the baby episodes in the _Symphonia domestica_ are too great a demand on our indulgence, and one is bound to say that there is something physically wrong with a brain that can fall so low as this. I hold him to be a man of enormous gifts, a magician, a wonder-worker of the first rank. But he can do nothing now on a large scale without deliberately spoiling it at some point or other out of pure freakishness--a freakishness that has ceased to be humour, and is merely the temporary lapse into silliness of a very clever man.

It goes without saying that if there is this degeneration--temporary or permanent--of the artistic sense that I suppose to be now going on in Strauss, it will show in other departments; and I think it shows pretty evidently in the music of the symphony as a whole. To my mind there is not a memorable theme in it; neither the theme of the husband, of the wife, nor of the child has anything like the quality that will entitle it to rank with the pregnant melodies of Strauss's other work. Think of the countless felicities of _Ein Heldenleben_, and you will realise at once the comparative poverty of the _Symphonia domestica_. Further, he is getting too fond of working upon mere snippets of phrases, instead of the great soaring, sweeping melodies of his earlier days; these tiny figures will of course go contrapuntally with almost anything--which is probably one reason for his using them--but for that same reason their perpetual chattering in the orchestra becomes in the end rather tiresome. I am not denying, of course, that at times the music rises to great heights; the scene of the parents playing with the child is exquisitely beautiful; there are fine moments in the love-music; and the fugue simply picks one up and carries one away, so broad and healthy is its heartiness. There is again much of that old technical mastery that makes slaves of us even where our soul revolts against the actual message of the composer. But on the whole I do not see how the new work can stand comparison with _Ein Heldenleben_ in any way. It looks far more impressive on paper than it actually sounds; it is grossly overscored, a good third of the notes being perfectly superfluous, as anyone can discover for himself by following it with the score. The mania is growing on Strauss for filling the music-paper with something or other, it matters not what; he has a lust for ink; it positively afflicts him to see an empty bar for any instrument. Master of orchestration as he is, there is page after page in the _Symphonia domestica_ containing the grossest of miscalculations; time after time we can see what his intention has been and how completely it has been frustrated by his own extravagance. He wants to wear all the clothes in his wardrobe at once. The same tendency is noticeable in his thematic work. When he has a good theme now he cannot leave it alone; he must fumble and fuss all round it till he has blurred its outline and stifled half its expression; the pleasant little lullaby, for example, would have been three times as effective without that jerky counterpoint against it in the oboe d'amore, bassoon, and viola, which simply gives the impression that somebody or other is always coming in at the wrong place, and quite disturbs the atmosphere of the lullaby itself. Altogether I am inclined to think that the new work as a whole shows a decided falling-off. And the reason? Well, is it not very likely that there has at last happened what some of us prophesied some two or three years ago? No artist can put so great a physical and mental strain upon himself as Strauss does and still keep his brain at its best. With all his many duties and occupations, his conducting and his constant travelling, it is a wonder he has any strength left to compose. For years he has been wearing his sensitive nervous system down to the very edge; and I should not be surprised to find that in doing so he has injured a good deal the delicacy of its tissue. It is said that he lives the busy life he does in order to make enough money to give up all public work and devote himself entirely to composition; but before that time comes he will probably, if he is not careful, have lost more of the divine fire than he can ever replace. The _Symphonia domestica_ I take to be the work of an enormously clever man who was once a genius.

FOOTNOTES:

[59] It is put down for a performance in London this spring.

[60] It is worth noting how Berlioz justified his own setting of some passages in _Roméo et Juliette_ orchestrally instead of vocally. "If," he says, "in the celebrated scenes of the garden and the cemetery, the dialogue of the two lovers, the _a parte_ of Juliet and the passionate outbursts of Romeo are not vocalised, if, in short, the duets of love and despair are confided to the orchestra, the reasons for this are numerous and easy to grasp. First, because we are dealing with a symphony, not with an opera. Secondly, duets of this nature having been treated vocally a thousand times, and by the greatest masters, there was both prudence and curiosity in trying another mode of expression. It is, moreover, because the very sublimity of this love made the painting of it so dangerous for the musician, that he had to give his imagination a latitude which the positive connotations of chanted words would not have permitted him, by resorting to the instrumental language--a language richer, more varied, less restricted, and by its very indefiniteness incomparably more powerful in cases of this kind."

[61] The reader will, of course, remember that I am here speaking only of the _tissue_ of Strauss's work. In the intellectual part of it, as I shall show later, he sometimes does things with the deliberate intention of startling us. See Section IV. of this essay.

[62] Perhaps I ought to except such things as the passage in _Ein Heldenleben_ (page 50 of the full score), where the strings and oboe run up in sevenths, instead of the sixths we expect--an agonising thing that always sounds as if somebody in the orchestra had made a mistake. Either Strauss wrote it so out of pure devilment, with his tongue in his cheek all the time, or it may answer to some subtle harmony in his brain that ours are incompetent to grasp. There can be no doubt that his ear must be vastly more acute than the normal organ. As Mr. James Huneker puts it in a brilliant article in his _Overtones_: "His is the most marvellous agglomeration of cortical cells that science has ever recorded. So acute are his powers of acoustical differentiation that he must hear, not alone tones beyond the base and the top of the normal scale unheard of by ordinary humans, but he must also hear, or rather overhear, the vibratory waves from all individual sounds. His music gives us the impression of new over-tones, of scales that violate the well-tempered, of tonalities that approximate to the quarter-tones of Oriental music."

[63] In _Feuersnot_, it may be said, Strauss himself goes back for a moment to something like that old world. But he does not take it seriously; the quaint mediæval story is only a background against which he can display his passion, his humour, his irony. Wagner would have made a portentous thing of the _Feuersnot_ subject; he would have discovered the profoundest philosophy and ethic in it. Strauss behaves towards it like a graceless, irreverent urchin in a cathedral.