Musical Portraits | Page 9

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
"Mazeppa." It is Lenau's hero himself, the particular being Don Juan
Tenorio. The vibrant, brilliant music of the up-surging, light-treading
strings, of the resonant, palpitating brass, springs forth in virile march,
reveals the man himself, his physical glamour, his intoxication that
caused him to see in every woman the Venus, and that in the end made
him the victim as well as the hero of the sexual life. It is Till
Eulenspiegel himself, the scurvy, comic rascal, the eternal dirty little
boy with his witty and obscene gestures, who leers out of every
measure of the tone-poem named for him, and twirls his fingers at his
nose's end at all the decorous and respectable world. Here, for once,
orchestral music is really wonderfully rascally and impudent, horns
gleeful and windy and insolent, wood-wind puckish and obscene. Here
a musical form reels hilariously and cuts capers and dances on bald
heads. The variation of "Don Quixote" that describes with wood-wind
and tambourine Dulcinea del Toboso is plump and plebeian and
good-natured with her very person, is all the more trenchantly vulgar
and flat for the preceding suave variation that describes the knight's fair,

sonorous dream of her. There is no music more plaintively stupid than
that which in the same work figures the "sheep" against which Don
Quixote battles so valiantly. Nor is there any music more maliciously,
malevolently petty than that which represents the adversaries in "Ein
Heldenleben." So exceedingly definite is the portrait of the Hero's
Consort, for which Frau Richard Strauss, without doubt, sat, that
without even having seen a photograph of the lady, one can aver that
she is graced with a diatonic figure. And, certainly the most amusing
passage of "Sinfonia Domestica" is that complex of Bavarian lustihood,
Bavarian grossness, Bavarian dreaminess and Bavarian good nature,
the thematic group that serves as autoportrait of the composer.
And just as there seemed few characters that Strauss could not paint, in
those days, so, too, there seemed few situations, few atmospheres, to
which he could not do justice. A couple of measures, the sinister
palpitation of the timpani and the violas, the brooding of the
wood-wind, the dull flickering of the flutes, the laboring breath of the
strings, and we are lying on the death-bed, exhausted and gasping for
air, weighed by the wrecks of hopes, awaiting the cruel blows on the
heart that will end everything. Horns and violins quaver and snarl,
flutes shrill, a brief figure descends in the oboes and clarinets, and Till
has shed his rascal-sweat and danced on the air. The orchestra reveals
us Don Juan's love affairs in all their individuality: first the passionate,
fiery relation with the Countess, quickly begun and quickly ended; then
the gentler and more inward communion with Anna, with the boredom
resulting from the lady's continual demand for sentiment and romantic
posturing; then the great night of love and roses, with its intoxicated
golden winding horns, its ecstatically singing violins; and finally the
crushing disappointment, the shudder of disgust. The battle in "Ein
Heldenleben" pictures war really; the whistling, ironical wind-machine
in "Don Quixote" satirizes dreams bitingly as no music has done; the
orchestra describes the enthusiastic Don recovering from his madness,
and smiles a conclusion; in "Also Sprach Zarathustra" it piles high the
tomes of science, and waltzes with the Superman in distant worlds.
And then, though less fecund an inventor than Liszt, less rich and large
a temperament than Berlioz, Strauss was better able than either of his

masters to organize his material on difficult and original lines, and find
musical forms representative of his programs. Because of their labors,
he was born freer of the classical traditions than they had been, and was
able to make music plot more exactly the curves of his concepts, to
submit the older forms, such as the rondo and the theme and variations,
more perfectly to his purpose. Compositions of the sort of "Till
Eulenspiegel," "Tod und Verklärung" and "Ein Heldenleben," solidly
made and yet both narrative and dramatic, place the symphonic poem
in the category of legitimate musical forms. The themes of "Till" grow
out of each other quite as do the themes of a Beethoven symphony or of
"Tristan" or of "Parsifal." Indeed, Strauss