Part 15

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But the rancour of his failure at the theatre still remained with Strauss, and he turned his attention again to the symphonic poem, in which he showed more and more marked dramatic tendencies, and a soul which grew daily prouder and more scornful. You should hear him speak in cold disdain of the theatre-going public--"that collection of bankers and tradespeople and miserable seekers after pleasure"--to know the sore that this triumphant artist hides. For not only was the theatre long closed to him, but, by an additional irony, he was obliged to conduct musical rubbish at the opera in Berlin, on account of the poor taste in music--really of Royal origin--that prevailed there.

The first great symphony of this new period was Till Eulenspiegel's lustige Streiche, nach alter Schelmenweise, in Rondeauform ("Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks, according to an old legend, in rondeau form"), op. 28. Here his disdain is as yet only expressed by witty bantering, which scoffs at the world's conventions. This figure of Till, this devil of a joker, the legendary hero of Germany and Flanders, is little known with us in France. And so Strauss's music loses much of its point, for it claims to recall a series of adventures which we know nothing about--Till crossing the market place and smacking his whip at the good women there; Till in priestly attire delivering a homely sermon; Till making love to a young woman who rebuffs him; Till making a fool of the pedants; Till tried and hung. Strauss's liking to present, by musical pictures, sometimes a character, sometimes a dialogue, or a situation, or a landscape, or an idea--that is to say, the most volatile and varied impressions of his capricious spirit--is very marked here. It is true that he falls back on several popular subjects, whose meaning would be very easily grasped in Germany; and that he develops them, not quite in the strict form of a rondeau, as he pretends, but still with a certain method, so that apart from a few frolics, which are unintelligible without a programme, the whole has real musical unity. This symphony, which is a great favourite in Germany, seems to me less original than some of his other compositions. It sounds rather like a refined piece of Mendelssohn's, with curious harmonies and very complicated instrumentation.

There is much more grandeur and originality in his Also sprach Zarathustra, Tondichtung frei, nach Nietzsche ("Thus spake Zarathustra, a free Tone-poem, after Nietzsche"), op. 30. Its sentiments are more broadly human, and the programme that Strauss has followed never loses itself in picturesque or anecdotic details, but is planned on expressive and noble lines. Strauss protests his own liberty in the face of Nietzsche's. He wishes to represent the different stages of development that a free spirit passes through in order to arrive at that of Super-man. These ideas are purely personal, and are not part of some system of philosophy. The sub-titles of the work are: Von den Hinterweltern ("Of Religious Ideas"), Von der grossen Sehnsucht ("Of Supreme Aspiration"), Von den Freuden und Leidenschaften ("Of Joys and Passions"), Das Grablied ("The Grave Song"), Von der Wissenschaft ("Of Knowledge"), Der Genesende ("The Convalescent"--the soul delivered of its desires), Das Tanzlied ("Dancing Song"), Nachtlied ("Night Song"). We are shown a man who, worn out by trying to solve the riddle of the universe, seeks refuge in religion. Then he revolts against ascetic ideas, and gives way madly to his passions. But he is quickly sated and disgusted and, weary to death, he tries science, but rejects it again, and succeeds in ridding himself of the uneasiness its knowledge brings by laughter--the master of the universe--and the merry dance, that dance of the universe where all the human sentiments enter hand-in-hand--religious beliefs, unsatisfied desires, passions, disgust, and joy. "Lift up your hearts on high, my brothers! Higher still! And mind you don't forget your legs! I have canonised laughter. You super-men, learn to laugh!" And the dance dies away and is lost in ethereal regions, and Zarathustra is lost to sight while dancing in distant worlds. But if he has solved the riddle of the universe for himself, he has not solved it for other men; and so, in contrast to the confident knowledge which fills the music, we get the sad note of interrogation at the end.

There are few subjects that offer richer material for musical expression. Strauss has treated it with power and dexterity; he has preserved unity in this chaos of passions, by contrasting the Sehnsucht of man with the impassive strength of Nature. As for the boldness of his conceptions, I need hardly remind those who heard the poem at the Cirque d'ete of the intricate "Fugue of Knowledge," the trills of the wood wind and the trumpets that voice Zarathustra's laugh, the dance of the universe, and the audacity of the conclusion which, in the key of B major, finishes up with a note of interrogation, in C natural, repeated three times.

I am far from thinking that the symphony is without a fault. The themes are of unequal value: some are quite commonplace; and, in a general way, the working up of the composition is superior to its underlying thought. I shall come back later on to certain faults in Strauss's music; here I only want to consider the overflowing life and feverish joy that set these worlds spinning.

Zarathustra shows the progress of scornful individualism in Strauss--"the spirit that hates the dogs of the populace and all that abortive and gloomy breed; the spirit of wild laughter that dances like a tempest as gaily on marshes and sadness as it does in fields." That spirit laughs at itself and at its idealism in the Don Quixote of 1897, fantastische Variationen uber ein Thema ritterlichen Charakters ("Don Quixote, fantastic variations on a theme of knightly character"), op. 35; and that symphony marks, I think, the extreme point to which programme music may be carried. In no other work does Strauss give better proof of his prodigious cleverness, intelligence, and wit; and I say sincerely that there is not a work where so much force is expended with so great a loss for the sake of a game and a musical joke which lasts forty-five minutes, and has given the author, the executants, and the public a good deal of tiring work. These symphonic poems are most difficult to play on account of the complexity, the independence, and the fantastic caprices of the different parts. Judge for yourself what the author expects to get out of the music by these few extracts from the programme:--

The introduction represents Don Quixote buried in books of chivalrous romance; and we have to see in the music, as we do in little Flemish and Dutch pictures, not only Don Quixote's features, but the words of the books he reads. Sometimes it is the story of a knight who is righting a giant, sometimes the adventures of a knight-errant who has dedicated himself to the services of a lady, sometimes it is a nobleman who has given his life in fulfilment of a vow to atone for his sins. Don Quixote's mind becomes confused (and our own with it) over all these stories; he is quite distracted. He leaves home in company with his squire. The two figures are drawn with great spirit; the one is an old Spaniard, stiff, languishing, distrustful, a bit of a poet, rather undecided in his opinions but obstinate when his mind is once made up; the other is a fat, jovial peasant, a cunning fellow, given to repeating himself in a waggish way and quoting droll proverbs--translated in the music by short-winded phrases that always return to the point they started from. The adventures begin. Here are the windmills (trills from the violins and wood wind), and the bleating army of the grand emperor, Alifanfaron (tremolos from the wood wind); and here, in the third variation, is a dialogue between the knight and his squire, from which we are to guess that Sancho questions his master on the advantages of a chivalrous life, for they seem to him doubtful. Don Quixote talks to him of glory and honour; but Sancho has no thought for it. In reply to these grand words he urges the superiority of sure profits, fat meals, and sounding money. Then the adventures begin again. The two companions fly through the air on wooden horses; and the illusion of this giddy voyage is given by chromatic passages on the flutes, harps, kettledrums, and a "windmachine," while "the tremolo of the double basses on the key-note shows that the horses have never left the earth."

But I must stop. I have said enough to show the fun the author is indulging in. When one hears the work one cannot help admiring the composer's technical knowledge, skill in orchestration, and sense of humour. And one is all the more surprised that he confines himself to the illustration of texts when he is so capable of creating comic and dramatic matter without it. Although Don Quixote is a marvel of skill and a very wonderful work, in which Strauss has developed a suppler and richer style, it marks, to my mind, a progress in his technique and a backward step in his mind, for he seems to have adopted the decadent conceptions of an art suited to playthings and trinkets to please a frivolous and affected society.

In Heldenleben ("The Life of a Hero"), op. 40, he recovers himself, and with a stroke of his wings reaches the summits. Here there is no foreign text for the music to study or illustrate or transcribe. Instead, there is lofty passion and an heroic will gradually developing itself and breaking down all obstacles. Without doubt Strauss had a programme in his mind, but he said to me himself: "You have no need to read it. It is enough to know that the hero is there fighting against his enemies." I do not know how far that is true, or if parts of the symphony would not be rather obscure to anyone who followed it without the text; but this speech seems to prove that he has understood the dangers of the literary symphony, and that he is striving for pure music.

Heldenleben is divided into six chapters: The Hero, The Hero's Adversaries, The Hero's Companion, The Field of Battle, The Peaceful Labours of the Hero, The Hero's Retirement from the World, and the Achievement of His Ideal. It is an extraordinary work, drunken with heroism, colossal, half barbaric, trivial, and sublime. An Homeric hero struggles among the sneers of a stupid crowd, a herd of brawling and hobbling ninnies. A violin solo, in a sort of concerto, describes the seductions, the coquetry, and the degraded wickedness of woman. Then strident trumpet-blasts sound the attack; and it is beyond me to give an idea of the terrible charge of cavalry that follows, which makes the earth tremble and our hearts leap; nor can I describe how an iron determination leads to the storming of towns, and all the tumultuous din and uproar of battle--the most splendid battle that has ever been painted in music. At its first performance in Germany I saw people tremble as they listened to it, and some rose up suddenly and made violent gestures quite unconsciously. I myself had a strange feeling of giddiness, as if an ocean had been upheaved, and I thought that for the first time for thirty years Germany had found a poet of Victory.

Heldenleben would be in every way one of the masterpieces of musical composition if a literary error had not suddenly cut short the soaring flight of its most impassioned pages, at the supreme point of interest in the movement, in order to follow the programme; though, besides this, a certain coldness, perhaps weariness, creeps in towards the end. The victorious hero perceives that he has conquered in vain: the baseness and stupidity of men have remained unaltered. He stifles his anger, and scornfully accepts the situation. Then he seeks refuge in the peace of Nature. The creative force within him flows out in imaginative works; and here Richard Strauss, with a daring warranted only by his genius, represents these works by reminiscences of his own compositions, and Don Juan, Macbeth, Tod und Verklaerung, Till, Zarathustra, Don Quixote, Guntram, and even his Lieder, associate themselves with the hero whose story he is telling. At times a storm will remind this hero of his combats; but he also remembers his moments of love and happiness, and his soul is quieted. Then the music unfolds itself serenely, and rises with calm strength to the closing chord of triumph, which is placed like a crown of glory on the hero's head.

There is no doubt that Beethoven's ideas have often inspired, stimulated, and guided Strauss's own ideas. One feels an indescribable reflection of the first Heroic and of the Ode to Joy in the key of the first part (E flat); and the last part recalls, even more forcibly, certain of Beethoven's Lieder. But the heroes of the two composers are very different: Beethoven's hero is more classical and more rebellious; and Strauss's hero is more concerned with the exterior world and his enemies, his conquests are achieved with greater difficulty, and his triumph is wilder in consequence. If that good Oulibicheff pretends to see the burning of Moscow in a discord in the first Heroic, what would he find here? What scenes of burning towns, what battlefields! Besides that there is cutting scorn and a mischievous laughter in Heldenleben that is never heard in Beethoven. There is, in fact, little kindness in Strauss's work; it is the work of a disdainful hero.

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In considering Strauss's music as a whole, one is at first struck by the diversity of his style. The North and the South mingle; and in his melodies one feels the attraction of the sun. Something Italian had crept into Tristan; but how much more of Italy there is in the work of this disciple of Nietzsche. The phrases are often Italian and their harmonies ultra-Germanic. Perhaps one of the greatest charms of Strauss's art is that we are able to watch the rent in the dark clouds of German polyphony, and see shining through it the smiling line of an Italian coast and the gay dancers on its shore. This is not merely a vague analogy. It would be easy, if idle, to notice unmistakable reminiscences of France and Italy even in Strauss's most advanced works, such as Zarathustra and Heldenleben. Mendelssohn, Gounod, Wagner, Rossini, and Mascagni elbow one another strangely. But these disparate elements have a softer outline when the work is taken as a whole, for they have been absorbed and controlled by the composer's imagination.

His orchestra is not less composite. It is not a compact and serried mass like Wagner's Macedonian phalanxes; it is parcelled out and as divided as possible. Each part aims at independence and works as it thinks best, without apparently troubling about the other parts. Sometimes it seems, as it did when reading Berlioz, that the execution must result in incoherence, and weaken the effect. But somehow the result is very satisfying. "Now doesn't that sound well?" said Strauss to me with a smile, just after he had finished conducting Heldenleben.

But it is especially in Strauss's subjects that caprice and a disordered imagination, the enemy of all reason, seem to reign. We have seen that these poems try to express in turn, or even simultaneously, literary texts, pictures, anecdotes, philosophical ideas, and the personal sentiments of the composer. What unity is there in the adventures of Don Quixote or Till Eulenspiegel? And yet unity is there, not in the subjects, but in the mind that deals with them. And these descriptive symphonies with their very diffuse literary life are vindicated by their musical life, which is much more logical and concentrated. The caprices of the poet are held in rein by the musician. The whimsical Till disports himself "after the old form of rondeau," and the folly of Don Quixote is told in "ten variations on a chivalrous theme, with an introduction and finale." In this way, Strauss's art, one of the most literary and descriptive in existence, is strongly distinguished from others of the same kind by the solidarity of its musical fabric, in which one feels the true musician--a musician brought up on the great masters, and a classic in spite of everything.

And so throughout that music a strong unity is felt among the unruly and often incongruous elements. It is the reflection, so it seems to me, of the soul of the composer. Its unity is not a matter of what he feels, but a matter of what he wishes. His emotion is much less interesting to him than his will, and it is less intense, and often quite devoid of any personal character. His restlessness seems to come from Schumann, his religious feeling from Mendelssohn, his voluptuousness from Gounod or the Italian masters, his passion from Wagner. But his will is heroic, dominating, eager, and powerful to a sublime degree. And that is why Richard Strauss is noble and, at present, quite unique. One feels in him a force that has dominion over men.

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It is through this heroic side that he may be considered as an inheritor of some of Beethoven's and Wagner's thought. It is this heroic side which makes him a poet--one of the greatest perhaps in modern Germany, who sees herself reflected in him and in his hero. Let us consider this hero.

He is an idealist with unbounded faith in the power of the mind and the liberating virtue of art. This idealism is at first religious, as in Tod und Verklaerung, and tender and compassionate as a woman, and full of youthful illusions, as in Guntram. Then it becomes vexed and indignant with the baseness of the world and the difficulties it encounters. Its scorn increases, and becomes sarcastic (Till Eulenspiegel); it is exasperated with years of conflict, and, in increasing bitterness, develops into a contemptuous heroism. How Strauss's laugh whips and stings us in Zarathustra! How his will bruises and cuts us in Heldenleben! Now that he has proved his power by victory, his pride knows no limit; he is elated and is unable to see that his lofty visions have become realities. But the people whose spirit he reflects see it. There are germs of morbidity in Germany to-day, a frenzy of pride, a belief in self, and a scorn for others that recalls France in the seventeenth century. "Dem Deutschen gehoert die Welt" ("Germany possesses the world") calmly say the prints displayed in the shop windows in Berlin. But when one arrives at this point the mind becomes delirious. All genius is raving mad if it comes to that; but Beethoven's madness concentrated itself in himself, and imagined things for his own enjoyment. The genius of many contemporary German artists is an aggressive thing, and is characterised by its destructive antagonism. The idealist who "possesses the world" is liable to dizziness. He was made to rule over an interior world. The splendour of the exterior images that he is called upon to govern dazzles him; and, like Caesar, he goes astray. Germany had hardly attained the position of empire of the world when she found Nietzsche's voice and that of the deluded artists of the Deutsches Theater and the Secession. Now there is the grandiose music of Richard Strauss.

What is all this fury leading to? What does this heroism aspire to? This force of will, bitter and strained, grows faint when it has reached its goal, or even before that. It does not know what to do with its victory. It disdains it, does not believe in it, or grows tired of it.

Like Michelangelo's Victory, it has set its knee on the captive's back, and seems ready to despatch him. But suddenly it stops, hesitates, and looks about with uncertain eyes, and its expression is one of languid disgust, as though weariness had seized it.

And this is how the work of Richard Strauss appears to me up to the present. Guntram kills Duke Robert, and immediately lets fall his sword. The frenzied laugh of Zarathustra ends in an avowal of discouraged impotence. The delirious passion of Don Juan dies away in nothingness. Don Quixote when dying forswears his illusions. Even the Hero himself admits the futility of his work, and seeks oblivion in an indifferent Nature. Nietzsche, speaking of the artists of our time, laughs at "those Tantaluses of the will, rebels and enemies of laws, who come, broken in spirit, and fall at the foot of the cross of Christ." Whether it is for the sake of the Cross or Nothingness, these heroes renounce their victories in disgust and despair, or with a resignation that is sadder still. It was not thus that Beethoven overcame his sorrows. Sad adagios make their lament in the middle of his symphonies, but a note of joy and triumph is always sounded at the end. His work is the triumph of a conquered hero; that of Strauss is the defeat of a conquering hero. This irresoluteness of the will can be still more clearly seen in contemporary German literature, and in particular in the author of Die versunkene Glocke. But it is more striking in Strauss, because he is more heroic. And so we get all this display of superhuman will, and the end is only "My desire is gone!"

In this lies the undying worm of German thought--I am speaking of the thought of the choice few who enlighten the present and anticipate the future. I see an heroic people, intoxicated by its triumphs, by its great riches, by its numbers, by its force, which clasps the world in its great arms and subjugates it, and then stops, fatigued by its conquest, and asks: "Why have I conquered?"

HUGO WOLF

The more one learns of the history of great artists, the more one is struck by the immense amount of sadness their lives enclose. Not only are they subjected to the trials and disappointments of ordinary life--which affect them more cruelly through their greater sensitiveness--but their surroundings are like a desert, because they are twenty, thirty, fifty, or even hundreds of years in advance of their contemporaries; and they are often condemned to despairing efforts, not to conquer the world, but to live.

These highly-strung natures are rarely able to keep up this incessant struggle for very long; and the finest genius may have to reckon with illness and misery and even premature death. And yet there were people like Mozart and Schumann and Weber who were happy in spite of everything, because they had been able to keep their soul's health and the joy of creation until the end; and though their bodies were worn out with fatigue and privation, a light was kept burning which sent its rays far into the darkness of their night. There are worse destinies; and Beethoven, though he was poor, shut up within himself, and deceived in his affections, was far from being the most unhappy of men. In his case, he possessed nothing but himself; but he possessed himself truly, and reigned over the world that was within him; and no other empire could ever be compared with that of his vast imagination, which stretched like a great expanse of sky, where tempests raged. Until his last day the old Prometheus in him, though fettered by a miserable body, preserved his iron force unbroken. When dying during a storm, his last gesture was one of revolt; and in his agony he raised himself on his bed and shook his fist at the sky. And so he fell, struck down by a single blow in the thick of the fight.