fade rapidly, irretrievably. At present one wonders how it is possible that one once sat entranced through performances of "The Flying Dutchman" and "Tannhäuser." "Lohengrin" begins to seem a little brutal, strangely Prussian lieutenant with its militaristic trumpets, its abuse of the brass. One finds oneself choosing even among the acts of "Tristan und Isolde," finding the first far inferior to the poignant, magnificent third. Sometimes, one glimpses a little too long behind his work not the heroic agonist, but the man who loved to languish in mournful salons, attired in furred dressing gowns.

Indeed, if Wagner seems great it is chiefly as one of the most delicate of musicians. It is the lightness of his brush stroke that makes us marvel at the third act of "Tristan," the first scene of the "Walküre." It is the delicacy of his fancy, the lilac fragrance pervading his inventions, that enchants us in the second act of "Die Meistersinger." Through the score of "Parsifal" there seem to pass angelic forms and wings dainty and fragile and silver-shod as those of Beardsley's "Morte d'Arthur."

But the debt we owe him will always give him a vast importance in our eyes. The men of to-day, all of them, stand directly on his shoulders. It is doubtful whether any of us, the passive public, would be here to-day as we are, were it not for his music.

Strauss

Strauss was never the fine, the perfect artist. Even in the first flare of youth, even at the time when he was the meteoric, dazzling figure flaunting over all the baldpates of the universe the standard of the musical future, it was apparent that there were serious flaws in his spirit. Despite the audacity with which he realized his amazing and poignant and ironic visions, despite his youthful fire and exuberance—and it was as something of a golden youth of music that Strauss burst upon the world—one sensed in him the not quite beautifully deepened man, heard at moments a callow accent in his eloquence, felt that an unmistakable alloy was fused with the generous gold. The purity, the inwardness, the searchings of the heart, the religious sentiment of beauty, present so unmistakably in the art of the great men who had developed music, were wanting in his work. He had neither the unswerving sense of style, nor the weightiness of touch, that mark the perfect craftsman. He was not sufficiently a scrupulous and exacting artist. It was apparent that he was careless, too easily contented with some of his material, not always happy in his detail. Mixed with his fire there was a sort of laziness and indifference. But, in those days, Strauss was unmistakably the genius, the original and bitingly expressive musician, the engineer of proud orchestral flights, the outrider and bannerman of his art, and one forgave his shortcomings because of the radiance of his figure, or remained only half-conscious of them.

For, once his period of apprenticeship passed, and all desire to write symphonies and chamber-music in the styles of Schumann and Mendelssohn and Brahms, to construct operas after the pattern of "Tannhäuser" and "Parsifal" gone out of him, this slender, sleepy young Bavarian with the pale curly hair and mustaches had commenced to develop the expressive power of music amazingly, to make the orchestra speak wonderfully as it had never spoken before. Under his touch the symphony, that most rigid and abstract and venerable of forms, was actually displaying some of the novel's narrative and analytical power, its literalness and concreteness of detail. It was describing the developments of a character, was psychologizing as it had hitherto done only in conjunction with poetry or the theater. Strauss made it represent the inflammations of the sex illusion, comment upon Nietzsche and Cervantes, recount the adventures, somersaults and end of a legendary rascal, portray a hero of our time. He made all these intellectual concepts plastic in a music of a brilliance and a sprightliness and mordancy that not overmany classic symphonies can rival. Other and former composers, no doubt, had dreamt of making the orchestra more concretely expressive, more precisely narrative and descriptive. The "Pastoral" symphony is by no means the first piece of deliberately, confessedly programmatic music. And before Strauss, both Berlioz and Liszt had experimented with the narrative, descriptive, analytical symphony. But it was only with Strauss that the symphonic novel was finally realized.

Neither Berlioz nor Liszt had really embodied their programs in living music. Liszt invariably sacrificed program to sanctioned musical form. For all his radicalism, he was too trammeled by the classical concepts, the traditional musical schemes and patterns to quite realize the symphony based on an extra-musical scheme. His symphonic poems reveal how difficult it was for him to make his music follow the curve of his ideas. In "Die Ideale," for instance, for the sake of a conventional close, he departed entirely from the curve of the poem of Schiller which he was pretending to transmute. The variations in which he reproduced Lamartine's verse are stereotyped enough. When was there a time when composers did not deform their themes in amorous, rustic and warlike variations? The relation between the pompous and somewhat empty "Lament and Triumph" and the unique, the distinct thing that was the life of Torquato Tasso is outward enough. And even "Mazeppa," in which Liszt's virtuosic genius stood him in good stead, makes one feel as though Liszt could never quite keep his eye on the fact, and finally became engrossed in the weaving of a musical pattern fairly extraneous to his idea. The "Faust Symphony" is, after all, an exception. Berlioz, too, failed on the whole to achieve the musical novel. Whenever he did attain musical form, it was generally at the expense of his program. Are the somewhat picturesque episodes of "Harold in Italy," whatever their virtues, and they are many, more than vaguely related to the Byronism that ostensibly elemented them? The surprisingly conventional overture to "King Lear" makes one feel as though Berlioz had sat through a performance of one of Shakespeare's comedies under the impression that he was assisting at the tragedy, so unrelated to its subject is the music. And where, on the other hand, Berlioz did succeed in being regardful of his program, as in the "Symphonic Fantastique," or in "Lélio," there resulted a somewhat thin and formless music.

But Strauss, benefiting by the experiments of his two predecessors, realized the new form better than any one before him had done. For he possessed the special gifts necessary to the performance of the task. He possessed, in the first place, a miraculous power of musical characterization. Through the representative nicety of his themes, through his inordinate capacity for thematic variation and transformation, his playful and witty and colorful instrumentation, Strauss was able to impart to his music a concreteness and descriptiveness and realism hitherto unknown to symphonic art, to characterize briefly, sparingly, justly, a personage, a situation, an event. He could be pathetic, ironic, playful, mordant, musing, at will. He was sure in his tone, was low-German in "Till Eulenspiegel," courtly and brilliant in "Don Juan," noble and bitterly sarcastic in "Don Quixote," childlike in "Tod und Verklärung." His orchestra was able to accommodate itself to all the folds and curves of his elaborate programs, to find equivalents for individual traits. It is not simply "a man," or even "an amatory hero" that is portrayed in "Don Juan." It is no vague symbol for the poet of the sort created by "Orpheus" or "Tasso" or