13 NOVEMBER 1936, Page 16

Music Richard Strauss

LAST week we had a Straus's Festival, Unofficial but fairly complete. Two of his operas and four of his major orchestral works were played, and the septuagenarian composer, to whoSe distinguished appearance the years have added a rubicund jollity, made almost daily appearances before the enthusiastic audiences who acclaimed his works. He was awarded, some- what belatedly, the gold medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society, and the Society was awarded in return one page from the manuscript of " Macbeth," which will henceforth keep company with that of the Ninth Symphony. Richard Strauss is the doyen of German composers. Indeed, he is the only com- poser of distinction left in the Third Reich—unless the frowned- upon Hindemith counts. At first sight, one might think that the composer of Salome might have met with a like disapproval from the present rulers of Germany, for it is only a step, if a long one, from the sumptuous decadence of Salome to the drab deca- dence of Anna-Anna. Yet, for all his occasional preoccupation with morbid pathology, Strauss is certainly not an unworthy representative of modern Germany. His grandiloquence, which too often becomes an empty rhetoric, belongs, perhaps, to the old Imperial days. But his efficiency in organising a complex material, his direct and often brutal realism, and, it must be added, his fundamental lack of humour are not untypical. Lack of humour ? The reader who has laughed at Baron Ochs or at Ariadne or, if anyone can, at the critics of Ein Heldenleben, may raise an eyebrow. But mark : it is " at" these characters, not " with " them that he has laughed. The true creator of comedy shows more sympathy with his characters than this cynic whose humour consists in cruelly poking fun at their weaknesses. He is himself a Till Eulen- spiegel playing practical jokes upon his creations. We may sympathise with Till, but not with the victims of his irresponsi- bility. Yet there is a set of characters drawn by Strauss with a most subtle skill and a deep sympathy. They are the dis- illusioned. In Salome and Elektra they wear the tragic mask. But comedy, in its widest sense including the laughter that is close to tears, is the true medium for this quality. Don Juan, Don Quixote, above all the Marschallin of Der Rosen- !cavalier are Strauss's finest creations—his own self-portraits in Effi Heldenleben and Symphonia Domestica his worst. In all these works there is a chromatic theme which the annotators label " disgust " or " satiety " or " world- weariness." They end on a note of pathos—none more subtly than Der Rosenkaralier. These are fine creations that may bring a measure of immortality.

Orchestral virtuosity is the most ephemeral of qualities, and in Strauss's works too often obscures our appreciation ; we cannot hear the music for the wood-wind. This fault arises, however, not from the exuberance of the composer's technical skill, but from a certain commonness of mentality and a fundamental mistake in aesthetic. The question of vulgarity goes too close to the bone to be written about at length. I will only say that Effi Heldenleben, so magnificently played last week under Mengelberg, seems to me an appal- ling self-exposure of spiritual barrenness. The aesthetic fallacy lies in the assumption that an ugly or a dull thing can be artistically presented in terms of ugliness and dullness. Critics may be ugly—it is not for ire to say—battles, whether military or metaphorical, may be horrible, and science may be dry as dust. But to make a noise like my pen dipped in vitriol scratching on this page is not to create beautiful music. The din of an enormous orchestra at full and dis- cordant blast remains, after more than thirty years, a hideous din and has nothing to do with music, whether of the future or the past. To write a deliberately dry Mato upon an uncouth theme is, apart from being the easiest thing in the world to do, of no possible musical significance. Indeed, Also Sprach Zarathustra, the most daring of Strauss',s tone-poems, because in it he has attempted to portray not a dramatic personality but a whole philosophy, seems to me the most abject of his failures. It exposes most clearly the absence of any real profundity in the make-up of a composer, whose technical and dramatic talents are of the highest order, and whose human sympathy has struck out of him an indi- iidual note of almost MOzartirin tenderness.

DYNELEY HUSSEY.