The Visit of Richard Strauss

The Position of the Munich Tone-Poet To-day Compared to That of Seventeen Years Since

PAUL ROSENFELD

ONCE again, Richard Strauss has come into America. Once again, we have been permitted to glimpse his sleepy and peevish and slightly disappointed expression, to see him drift gracefully onto the podium and off again, to watch the swimming play of his baton at the end of an arm that might have worn a bracelet, to hear him play indifferently well the accompaniments to his song. Once again, we have been given a sort of Strauss Festival under his direction. According to the careful computation of the New York World, Strauss, during this visit gave upward of forty concerts in America; appeared in nineteen cities, played eleven times in New York; conducted or played sixty of his compositions. Most everything Straussian for orchestra was aired; not even "Macbeth" was permitted to sleep its justly merited slumber undisturbedly. And, once again, Richard Strauss has disappeared out of the port of New York in the general direction of Munich, Garmish and Vienna, carrying with him at least several American coins of the realm.

Still, between the second going and the first, there is a notable dissimilarity. When Strauss departed the country not quite eighteen years since, no universal applause, but a great and absurd scandal blared after his disappearing form. Strauss, so it was declaimed, had degraded music. Of course, Strauss had been degrading music a long while, ever since some good folk perceived in Don Juan the musical depiction of the sort of establishment not generally referred to in polite society, and in Till Eulenspiegel, the depiction of pot-house scenes. But, this time, the degradation had been achieved through a performance of works in the auditorium of a department store. The leading German composer, so it was raged, the heir therefore to Mozart and Beethoven and Wagner, Strauss had dragged the heavenly muse through the disreputable aisles of drygoods and commercialdom. Both sides of the stormy Atlantic reverberated with the enormity of the thing. All Olympus with the thunder shook. And the clever critic suggested that Dr. Strauss name his next tone-poem Wanamakeriana.

Music and the Department Store

THIS year, however, no furore followed the departing figure of the descendant of Liszt and beerbrewer Pschorr. But it was not alone for the reason that Strauss eschewed his old haunts off Astor Place, and frequented chastely the Metropolitan Opera House and Carnegie Hall, that glory spoke where previously contumely had scolded. One can be sure that, even had Richard II conducted once again in Wanamaker's, no scandal would have risen. For one thing, the world has moved onward in the matter of certain ideas of respectability. We are no longer as assured as once we were that it would degrade music to take her into a department store. On the contrary, we are not so certain that it would not flatter unduly the poor thing. For while we are still fairly certain that department stores are a necessity of modern life, and fulfill a real and an important function, we are not at all certain that as much can be said for the art of music. The art may, after all, like all the other arts, be the relique of a rapidly dwindling world.

Surely, few things are as unnourishing to the intelligence as that which to-day passes under the name of a concert. And then, even for those who still persevere in their feelings that music performs, or might perform a vital function, neither the Metropolitan Opera House nor Carnegie Hall seem beyond all cavil groves exquisitely appointed for the dance of the sacred nine. Neither the red upholstery and atmosphere of the one nor the brown upholstery and atmosphere of the other seem to us to have a particularly noticeable relationship to the sounding souls of composers. Indeed, it is to be suspected that were Beethoven or Wagner to enter New York City to-morrow, they would find few places where they would less gladly stop and live than the two institutions that are supposed to harbour their work.

For another, over Strauss' second trip to these western waters there shone the sign of an unofficial and conciliatory embassy, and that would have annihilated the most departmentstorish scandal; and did make the entire trip a many-sided success. Was it really only to collect thousand-dollar bills for himself and the opera house in Vienna that the composer came once again to America? Was it only to revive the fainting interest in his symphonic works? One can scarcely persuade oneself that no other motive brought him here. To us, it seems very much as though he came with the sanction of Berlin; as though the republican officials saw in the project of his visit a very simple means of offering a friendly hand, and therefore urged him onward. Whether or not, however, Strauss came as an unofficial ambassador, it was as something of the sort that he was received by numberless people. It was as such the worthies of City Hall welcomed him, a few days after they had extended their welcome to Maréchal Foch. It was as such that the crowd that filled even the aisles at Strauss' first concert in Carnegie Hall applauded. People, of course, came to hear his music. People came to see the monstrous musician. People came for the purpose of being able next day to preface their business remarks with a "cultured" account of the Strauss concert, a sort of variation on the eternal "I've just read such an interesting article in the New Republic," and thus magnificently oil the roadways.

But, most of all, we are assured, the audience was composed of men and women who assisted because there was in them a secret shame that they had permitted the daughters of the North German Lloyd and other persons full of hatred for everything both good and bad that was German to bully them into making war on the fine things of life. They came in joy because they were no longer afraid to call beauty not French or German or Swiss or English, but beauty merely. Of course, everyone knew that at the first blast of renewed warfare, they would find themselves sufficiently weak to permit to be snatched from them the innocent things for which they cared; to permit howling muckerdom to level its ukases against music and other matters of the spirit. But one can go sincerely repentant to some creature whom one has betrayed, and whom, one knows, one is like to betray again. And it was in a sincere spirit that people went to bow for a moment again before the human, the international genius, to which all had been so miserably unfaithful. And if Strauss was still able, after his variegated career and after his reception at the hands of Mayor Hylan, to feel anything at all, something of what surcharged the atmosphere in crowded Carnegie Hall that night must have permeated to him. He, too, must for a moment have looked within, and seen there, too, something of the humility before the outraged and betrayed self that was in the individuals gathered; and wondered at the tragic absurdity of the life in all, that makes people, despite all insight, fall on themselves in wolfish destructiveness.

The One Time Anarch of Music

BUT in another region of life the seventeen years that elapsed between the first and the visit just concluded have not been favourable to Richard Strauss. They may have elevated the quondam wild boy of music into an unofficial ambassador of a civilization. But they have also well demoted him from the preeminent station among the living composers he once held. It seems strange, indeed, to think that the "anarch of art" of the year 1904 should at the beginning of the year 1922 appear the not very significant composer that Strauss in our eyes has become. What was he not to the world those years since? A sort of musical antichrist, writing forbidden and necromantic things for the orchestra, pulling the white beard of God, initiating an audience into devilish and Byronic philosophies via music, stirring a veritable hell's kitchen cauldron in his fast-playing orchestra. One became dizzy at the very thought of the programs of his symphonic poems—tales of archrogues, experience of death, dance of Zarathustra the overman, collisions with the cosmic riddle, baby's bath and quarreling parents on the full orchestra. It was all so much like flying off the battlements of the tower of Babel to wage war with heaven. James Huneker knew what he meant when he stated that Richard Strauss wrote music with "the pen of beyond good and evil." One read the same author's statement that there was no god for Nietzsche but self, and no god for Strauss but self, and saw the sin against the holy ghost, the unforgiveable sin, heave over the horizon into the region comprehensible to the eye. And then, in performance, the music was all so infinitely exciting, so infinitely bewildering. It went so fast, faster even than Wagner. Violins spiralled into infinity. One never knew just what it was that was happening, whether Till was upsetting the apple-carts of the market-women or making amorous declarations or hearing the judge pronounce sentence against him; whether Don Juan was making love to Elvira or Anna or Zerlinchen; whether the orchestra was painting the infancy, adolescence or youth of the dying man in Tod un Verklärung; whether it was religion or science that was being discarded by humanity in the effort of reconciling its metaphysical mind with the nature of the universe; or whether the uncle was saying that the baby looked "just like papa," or the clock was striking six, or Herr and Frau Dr. Strauss were connubially embracing or throwing the breakfast dishes at each other's heads. When one did follow the program, sonorous and brilliant pages of music set everything in one singing. The plangent trumpets of Don Quixote's disillusionment; the rhythmic iron of the hero's tread; the banging tympani of the sunrise in Zarathustra; the singing horns and violins of Don Juan's feast, were the headiest of draughts.

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A Great Musician

AND now? Oh, Bottom, how art thou translated! Where is he gone to, the anarch of music, the antichrist of tone? For it is not only the programs of Strauss' works that no longer interest us, and give no single thrill. It is the composer who grips us no longer. The great tone poems of this Münchener kindl are marvellous stuff still, to be sure, but for the ear only. Not for the mind. You cannot listen to them as "music" impassionedly. There can be no doubt that for pure sonority, little has been written for the orchestra that can match these many rich-sounding works. Strauss, without a doubt, has always been, will always remain, a great musician in the narrow sense. It is questionable whether any one has better understood the orchestra than he. It is questionable whether any one has ever had a nicer sense of the purely orchestral qualities, of the general character of the instruments, of the beautiful tapestry-like interplay of these sonorities. He has written passage after passage that is a marvellous network of timbres and colours, rich, dense and glowing. One is overwhelmed again and again by sheer iridescent lovelinesses of sound that he conjures out of the band by the great many-stranded middle-section of the Sinfonia Domestica, by the shimmering high-fluted introduction to the Ubermenschenwalzer, as Mr. Deems Taylor has so brightly called it, in Also Sprach Zarathustra, by the poisonously entrancing sounds of Salome's Dance. It is a marvellous sensuality this man possesses, a virtuosic gift for the orchestra that is comparable only to the virtuosic gift of a d'Annunzio for prose, of a Rubenstein for piano-playing. It is among these great musicians that he properly belongs, not among the great composers.

For, as music, his work has little significance. It is all so far away, this body of work, when one considers it as significant form. It has so little meaning as life, stirs nothing deep in one, nourishes no high sense of beauty. It flows before one a many hued stream. But one bathes in it as one might bathe in rivers of perfumed vapour, and issues neither touched nor warmed nor satisfied. One is sometimes bored; never deeply thrilled or exalted. It is all so like some marvellously amusing game, in which one joins for a while, and then quits again at will. One cannot do that with work full of life. But Strauss' concerts of music were not life. They were the most delightful, the most splendid of pastimes. The two concerts, the one at Carnegie Hall, the other at the Metropolitan Opera House, at which were performed Don Juan, Til Eulenspiegel, and the Sinfonia Domestica, and Also Sprach Zarathustra, Salome's Dance, and Tod und Verklärung, were the most delightful of evening's entertainments. The Philadelphia Orchestra played sweetly and luminously as it never plays under the baton of Dr. Stokowski. Frau Schumann sang, at the second concert, with a gift of herself, a goodness, a pure loveliness of tone, scarcely to be matched on the concert-stage. A good time was had by all. A good time is not had by all at the great moments of musical life. But, after the conclusion of the Strauss concerts, one put on one's overcoat in a pleasant humour, and went away contented and whistling one of the composer's fetching tunes.

For want of imagination appears to have limited fatally Strauss the composer. One feels the want first of all in the doubtful distinctiveness of his thematic material. He has few striking ideas. Whenever he ceases being clever, ceases characterizing, and tries to express a sustained emotional state, he lapses very quickly into a sort of not quite refined German idiom, a sort of facile and common melodiousness, a vein of the terrible and idiotic sentimentality which is ever so near the German heart. One finds it at its worst in Korngold, Strauss' faithful disciple, and it is not at its best in the master. Were it only a German equivalent for the folk-songishness that is to be found in the music of certain of the Russian composers, one would not complain. But, alas, it tastes much less of the simple folk than of the half-educated middle classes, with their taverns, mannerchore, operettas and beer. No doubt, Strauss manages to clothe these plebeian generalities in the most magnificent dress; manages to press out of them, thanks to his prodigious contrapuntal dexterity, the last drop of emotional possibility they contain. But one is always conscious that the musical table, so profusely loaded with roses, crystal, linen, silver, and illuminated by softest candlelight, still carries as its piece de resistance a juicy home-made sausage.

The Want of Form

ONE feels the want of imagination in the bonelessness of the greater part of Strauss' compositions. Both songs and tone-poems suffer very apparently from bonelessness. One never is sure that Strauss felt before he started the musical composition as a whole, and invented as he plotted the line projected by his imagination. On the contrary, one feels that he was only half sure where he was going, and improvised as he went along. All his work has this sort of spottiness. No great structure, as in Beethoven, carries us along over occasional not too inspired passages. Strauss wanders along. When he has something to say, it is well enough. But when he has nothing to say, as in portions of Heldenleben, the situation becomes Sahara-like. Curiously enough, it was the Sinfonia Domestica, of all Strauss' tone-poems the one hitherto most despised, that stood up strongest and most convex in his concerts, and seemed together with Tod und Verklärung the nearest approach to musical form attained by the composer.

It is not until we grasp this absence in him of the power to imagine that we commence to understand Strauss the phenomenon. For the lack of this power explains as does nothing else his manner of expression. He must have felt very early his weakness. For when Ritter made him acquainted with the programmatic compositions of Liszt and Berlioz, the young Strauss immediately threw over the classical forms which the prejudices of his anti-Wagnerian father had forced upon him, and accepted the program, the intellectualizing substitute for the imagination—born form. In it, he saw a way out of his difficulty. But, alas, the way proved to be a mire. Strauss then turned to the operatic form, hoping there to find a support for his weak imagination. But here, too, he failed to overcome his difficulty. For that difficulty is not to be overcome. So Strauss has remained . . . what we have seen him to be here.