MUSIC.
STRAUSS IN PERSPECTIVE.
THE problem of Strauss is one that many writers claim to have solved at one time or another, but it is noticeable that the solutions differ, according to date rather than to the writer involved. For Strauss is a composer who has certain marked fundamental characteristics which time has brought
more and more to the surface, and it is only now that critics as a whole have begun to give a fair estimate of his value. This estimate has been retarded by the inordinate praise or blame accorded to him by his notoriety as the musical enfant terrible of the first years of the century. Obscure,
ugly, incomprehensible, dull, noisy : here arc some of the epithets hurled at him in the course of those years ; while
Mr. Arthur Symons, in a remarkably brilliant essay, accused him of debauching music by endeavouring to make it serve the turn of literary and philosophic theories. But, true as much of this unfavourable criticism undoubtedly was, it missed the main point, which has only lately been recognized. The Wagnerian cloak, flourished torero-wise in the faces of the Edwardian public, both frightened and impressed them to such a degree that, with the exception of a very small discerning minority (whom I mention from a feeling that they must have existed, rather than from a knowledge that they did), the essential commonplaceness of Strauss's musical thought was obscured for them. But now that a large body of work by him exists for our examination, his poverty of invention seems astounding when coupled with that superb constructive faculty for which alone he deserves a ,place amongst considerable composers. It is almost incredible now that anyone could ever have been frightened by Feuersnot or puzzled by the bogy-man, that is, Zarathustra. Twitch away the magician's cloak and the feckless little valse tunes stand revealed amid a storm of musical incantations that are no more impressive than the sham fires that burn in 'vases on the terrace of Herod's summer resort.
i And he is quite shameless about his poverty of invention. He often makes a single phrase (and of no particular value at that) do service time after time in different works. The particular one of which I am thinking appears in Elektra, Ariadne auf Naxos and the Alpine Symphony. Thus he is one of the most irritating of composers, for it is somehow all wrong that one who can move us inconceivably at times by the real greatness and beauty of his work should be capable of letting us down the next moment with some passage the quality of which a moment's thought would seem enough to reveal.
We have now heard two performances of Salome, an opera which has not been heard in England since the War, but which, when it was first performed in Germany in 1905, spread a turmoil of excitement in all directions. The bourgeois was ecpati. We could not be expected to see (and hear) straight then, but we can and do now. The perform- ances have been remarkably fine from the singers' point of view, and GOta Ljungberg as Salome and Maria Olczewska • as Herodias have scored individual triumphs, though the management of the orchestra unlier Herr Alwin left almost as much to be desired as in the last performance of Tristan. But the work, with the exception of a few passages, comes out of it badly enough. The music appears now as much like a bit of tawdry finery fished out of an old box as the foolish play upon which it is hung. The ecstatic monologues of Salome (rushed out of recognition by the conductor) flashed at us with the &id, heartless glitter of a complicated garment hung with metal ornaments. It was all cold, cold as any stone. This did not s0 much matter in the Herod- Herodias passages, where the composer's brilliant orchestra- tion and astonishing effects compel our horrorand admiration; but the. perfunctory and rather naive psychology of the " love 7 themes are totally inadequate to Wflde's conception of that passion.
Having shown what he could do to astonish with Salome and Elektra (which, by the way, is a Much finer work), Strauss seems to have become temporarily disgusted with the Wagnerian cloak, to the extent of twitching it off for himself. The result was instantaneous, and the world became richer for two masterpieces, Der Rosenkavalier and Ariadne auf Naxos. The sea-change which his music suffered seemed to do away, for the time being, with his former poverty of invention, and he poured out melody after melody of the pure quality of genius. It was an astonishing phenomenon that now, unfortunately, seems to have been but a flash in the pan. The ballet Joseph's Legend and the opera Die Frau ohne Schatten indicate a harking back to the Wagnerian system, for which the composer seemed to have no further need. Both these works contain passages of great beauty and astounding brilliance, but in them vulgarity of theme is carried to a pitch never approached before— even in Salome. There would seem to be a fundamental lack of taste—a blind spot in Strauss—that allows him to commit musical enormities that are almost unparalleled. It is the same type of mind (on a lower scale) that sets the Hindu Song from Sad/co to ragtime. It is true that in listening to Der Rosenkavalier we are not much disturbed by the fact that here we have the typical valse of the late nineteenth century set to a deliberate evocation of the early eighteenth—or that in Ariadne the same type of valse is relegated to seventeenth-century buffoons. But to do this brazenly, as Strauss has done it, indicates an indifference to the fitness of things that must tell against him in the end. And though he is still composing, I think one may safely predict that the end has come—with the final scene in Die Frau ohne Schallen.
The ultimate failure of composers like Strauss is almost an argument for original sin. That a master of orchestra- tion, with a constructive faculty equal to that of the greatest, and melodic genius that produces long passages and sudden phrases that ravish, surely and instantly ; that a mind of this calibre should be capable of frequent and absolutely fatal lapses of artistry is a cause for universal disappointment with the potentialities of the human mind.
EDWARD SACKVILLE WEST.
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