Musical Portraits | Page 8

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