RICHARD STRAUSS AND THE ART OF SOUND
I
The years now with us are prophetic of a century notable from its beginning; a century destined to achieve perhaps beyond our boldest imagining. Already is the century achieving, as, like a youthful but formidable being, it assaults that citadel of mystery wherein Truth must relinquish, one by one, her most valued and guarded possessions.
To the observant, the present is a time of shaken foundations, a time of much actual overthrow, and even a time of planning that broader and deeper bases shall well sustain the super-imposed new. Amidst an upheaval of things social, political, scientific, ethical and æsthetic; an upheaval world-wide, and necessarily sourced in the sub-strata of the world of causes; Art, for instance, is unavoidably disturbed throughout its various provinces.
Only the over-sanguine will assume that the better must needs rise from upheaval and overthrow. Therefore let us look but for the reasonable, for does not many a desolated province of this material world belie the theory of uninterrupted advance?
Appearances indicate that the art of music is entering upon a period the most momentous of its existence, a period of transition more radical than when it was emerging from the Greek modes; a period perhaps of storm and stress, of morbid and eccentric individualism; a period like that which almost overwhelmed literature in the early days of Goethe and Schiller; or, perhaps, a period of real progress; but, in either event, a period from which it will come forth an art far different from that of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin and Wagner.
Because progressive, the human mind will not regard its greatest work with a complacency inimical to further effort. Ever it fashions and re-fashions, achieving yesterday, failing to-day, and then more than retrieving on some fortunate morrow. Strange doings and sayings are rife in the musical world of the present. Denying the validity of fixed key, Claude Debussy begins and ends his tone creations anywhere within the limit of the chromatic scale. Max Reger teaches the intimate fellowship of the entire twenty-four keys, while Richard Strauss has well-nigh outgrown the twelve semitones of our time-honored gamut which must be enlarged if it would meet the needs of his successors. It is the opinion of many that, in this event, the art of music will be merged in what we shall here call the art of sound. Concerning this realistic art, this art to be, let us explain briefly that, whereas the word sound signifies all that the ear cognizes, whether as euphony, cacophony or mere noise, yet, for sound to attain to the status of an art, art must endow with definite and adequate purpose not only euphony, but also every other sound, including mere noise.
While Strauss with almost audacious boldness is leading toward the enharmonic possibilities of an augmented scale, the more conservative but no less ingenious Reger is looking back to his beloved Bach, and showing what, through a greatly extended key relationship, that master might have accomplished with the good old semitones. Eschewing programme music, and all else demanding literary elucidation, Reger will, to the tone-poems of his rival, offset a fugue or a sonata ultra enough for any save the disciples of Strauss and Debussy.
Like Strauss, Debussy is in no wise to be ignored, but always and wholly to be reckoned with in an estimate of advanced methods. Paradoxical at first thought is the fact that Debussy, whose measures abound in unresolved discords of ultra-modern origin, should found his music not uniformly on the major and the minor scales, but, by preference, largely on the old church modes. This reversion to the mediæval indicates a period of crisis wherein the beam fluctuates between the extremes of old and new tonal methods. Dispensing with the size and blare of the modern orchestra, and shunning, as if an obsession, the Wagnerian models, Debussy will not for one brief moment permit in the lyric drama such outbursts of vocal melody as crown the climaxes of «Lohengrin,» and the passionate love scenes of «Tannhäuser.» And this for the specific reason that «Melody is almost anti-lyric, and powerless to express the constant change of emotional life. Melody is suitable only for the song which confirms a fixed sentiment.»
While Strauss is held to be the lineal successor of Liszt, he is in fact a compound of various modern tendencies. In him we find the philosophy of Nietzsche, the impressionism of Manet, and the realism of which De Maupassant and Zola and Whitman and the youthful Swinburne were exponents; a realism which, because it over-emphasizes the erotic, the pathological, and the ugly, misinterprets man and nature, and so betrays the characteristics of decadent art.
What would have been the attitude of Wagner toward Strauss may be inferred from his caustic attacks on Berlioz whose music he called foolish and eccentric; and yet, as a producer of novel effects he himself was much indebted to the French composer, and, in turn, was no small factor in the formation of one whom Strauss' disciples deem the greater Richard. Notwithstanding which, we affirm that Strauss is more closely related to Liszt whose talents, both in pianoforte and orchestral composition, tended to virtuoso display more than to the utterance of original and lofty ideas.
Prior to the advent of Wagner, the musical composer deemed it necessary always to appeal to the sense of the beautiful. Whatever his theme, his music, ever conforming to the established laws of harmony, must not be repugnant to that æsthetic sense. At times he no doubt overstepped his self-imposed limit, but, somehow, the ear of the listener has accustomed itself to the innovation, and with the result that not a few wholly doubt the existence of a line of cleavage between the ugly and the beautiful. However, a sane philosophy will demonstrate that beauty and ugliness are as unlike as are good and evil.
Neither the painter nor the sculptor restricts himself to pleasing subjects; the grotesque and the horrible have been deemed not unworthy the brush and the chisel of artists indubitably great, and it can be argued that to music should be accorded an expression free and faithful as that allowed to painting and the plastic arts. On the other hand, popular opinion has ever been, and perhaps ever will be, that what is actually ugly is not music. To this opinion the modern reply is that the word music carries with it far too restricted a meaning; the office of the tonal art, like that of all other arts, is to express not the half but the whole of life; in fact, the universal duality in nature and in man.
With deep philosophic and artistic insight, Wagner elaborated an art destined, as he believed, to supersede Italian Opera. Despite his harsh but convincing strictures, and despite the theories and practice of Debussy who holds that in the Music Drama the vocal parts, lest they hinder the dramatic action, should be reduced to a rhythmic chant devoid of melody, Italian Opera survives; from temporary eclipse it is emerging bright as before. In the life labors of the great reformer, we are beginning to see simply a new school supplementing the old. We are beginning to see that the denouncer of Donizetti and Rossini and Verdi and Bellini and the rest, was himself not quite faultless in practice, however correct in theory. Musicians of eminence now admit that the incongruities of Italian Opera are offset by the over-long and the slow-moving in the Wagnerian Music Drama. Naturally the world refuses to forget «Lucia» and «Il Barbiere» and «Rigoletto» and «Norma,» and in fact any work whereinto the muse of Italy has poured her quenchless fire.
Granting that the faulty and inadequate Greek modes had so cramped and chilled musical expression that, in their abandonment, little of value was lost to the musicians of past centuries, what shall be said of our modern musical heritage, the gift of the last two hundred years, and which the universal adoption of a new and enlarged musical scale would render obsolete? Will not that spirit of love and loyalty which defends the cause of Italian Opera, make determined stand against the novel system? From the twelve notes of the chromatic scale the great German masters have evoked the superlatively beautiful. Shaping their imaginings to lofty ideals, they have in fact epitomized the larger, better part of man and nature, as understood by the German mind. Admitting this, can the cultured musician bring himself to ignore the past of German art? for this he must needs do under an exclusively modern regime. No! a thousand times no! That for music a different scale can be no more than supplementary is indicated by the history of all other æsthetic arts. Their every worthy type endures; not any one has quite eclipsed another.
The two leading races, once peopling the southmost peninsulas of Europe, were extinct centuries ago, but their daily tongues survive, dead languages never while endures the world, for they bring to all enlightened peoples the period and climax of the orator, the meter of the tragic dramatist, and the notes of the Homeric and the Virgilian muse, fresh and unrivalled as when Greece and Italy first lent ear.
There have been schools of architecture, both Pagan and Christian, schools of sculpture from Phidias onward; schools of modern painting since the mature work of Giotto; and the wise ages, far from selecting and excluding, have preserved them all.
To men of creative genius were granted glimpses of Truth; each from his own angle beheld the ineffable vision. Through the sundered veils of illusion, as through the storm's momentary rift, the permitted artist beheld his own ruling star, sometimes a royal sun, sometimes a subordinate planet, but always one without which the hierarchy of heaven were incomplete.
That neither the school of Wagner nor that of Strauss will supersede existing national schools is assured for the additional reason that these are the outcome of national ideals. In every race of civilization the man of creative genius proves his people to be possessed of ideals of art peculiarly their own. There results for example the Slavic, the Scandinavian, the English, the German, the Spanish, the French, the Italian ideals, and, lofty in possibilities, that of the amalgamating race destined to fill this ample western land of ours.
The ideals of tonal art! Surely the Wagnerian and the Straussian models cannot include them all! Varied as the geography of the globe, as the configurations of its surface, those national ideals are sombre with the solitude of barren steppes; they are gloomy with the twilight of deep-indenting fjords; they are rich with the ancient, the mediæval, the modern, of a land of memories gathered since the coming of Arthur. Otherwhere they are fraught with the romance of Rhenish castles where Minnesingers and Meistersingers have proved the magic power of song; or else they bring the southern night of castinets and tripping feet, and the moonlit wonder of Moorish Alhambra. How well those ideals have embodied the gay and the graceful, also the volatile as the vintage of vine-clad Champagne! And how fitly are they born by Adriatic and Mediterranean shores where the ardent day-beam warms the heart to love's emotion; and, in days to come, shall they not suggest the amplitude of snowy mountain chains, the undulating sweep of prairies, the breezy expanse of vast inland seas, and the eternal dash and roar of ocean on our eastern and our western coasts?
These, and countless other ideals sourced in the world's composite life, have given rise to a necessarily varied art whose inner unity must remain undiscovered till mankind becomes one great family, bound by a community of ideals and interests in the millennial dawn of a yet-unrisen day.
II
The belief that for them only is the pure and high vision of Truth, and that the world should look with their eyes and abide by their interpretation, is the folly of many of the wisest reformers. Over-enthusiasm inflames the minds of such, and disturbs their sanity of judgment. The reformer in art is usually a philosopher pledged to some system into which, as into a mould, he pours at fluid heat his artistic imaginings. Because no system of philosophy yet elaborated finds general acceptance, or because, as Schopenhauer intimates, one discovers in any philosophy only what his capacity permits, our reformer will appeal chiefly to those whose minds are akin to his own.
For the comprehension of Beethoven and his great predecessors, little more than a trained ear is necessary; but, for the comprehension of our latest composers, one must habituate himself to abstruse metaphysical thinking. To endorse Wagner, both wholly and understandingly, one should assent to Schopenhauer's theory of music. To endorse in like manner the attitude of Strauss, one should assent to the «Super Man» of Nietzsche, and his crowning qualities «evolved good and evolved evil.»
If, as Whitman says, perfect sanity characterizes the master among philosophers, how can more than a cult accept that topsy-turvy of ethical values, that quack mixture of Scientific Materialism and Comtism run mad, the system of Nietzsche? It is probably that but for his «Beyond Good and Evil,» Strauss, the foremost exponent of musical ultraism, would have hesitated at more than half-way measures.
In the morning, ere he attempted creative work, Wagner was wont to say, «If we could keep our hearts pure this day, untainted and untempted by the false values of the world, what visions of Infinity itself were possible to us!»
Surely the heart, indispensable to the creation of a masterpiece of art, cannot be stimulated by a philosophy brutal because without pity; a philosophy shallow because ignorant of the essential nature and ultimate end of what it deems mere weakness; a philosophy which would crush that symbol of weakness, the falling sparrow, and quench all love for the neighbor if in him appear no promise of «Super Man.» Now who is this «Super Man,» this ideal of Nietzsche and his tonal interpreter? Is he not a being fashioned much after the model of what the race no more desires, to wit, the outworn gods of Greece and Rome? Is he not an ideal compounded of mutually destructive qualities?
Because of the serious shortcomings we have indicated, and because of others which will be pointed out, the art of Strauss may never reach the highest levels; his chief office as composer, like that of Whitman as poet, may be to explore a domain wherein the superlative genius of the future is to expand his ample powers. That genius, and in our opinion he only, can reveal the legitimate possibilities of sound. In his tonal creations the cacophonious, as well as the euphonious, must be employed in such way that every mood of man and every shade of human feeling shall be faithfully portrayed, and the world itself epitomized. His must be a sane equipoise, an unfailing sense of fitness, the consummate ability to adjust to a nicety, so that always the end justifies the means. Already his predecessors in the great acknowledged schools have developed the art of euphony. It will be his even more difficult and exacting task to develop the art of cacophony, and fuse the two in such way that they over-picture not the totality of man and nature.
Notwithstanding Wagner's belief that instrumental music could not further develop unless fused with the sister arts of poetry, painting and dramatic action, the modern outlook discovers in the art of sound almost limitless possibilities as yet unrealized; but, judging from the past, the stupendous tonal edifice created by the coming master will not overshadow the erections of composers from Bach to Wagner.
Still the divine Mozart will turn us to the never-to-be despised beauty of form chaste and classic. Still Beethoven's temple of music will reveal that form's complete and glorious development and crowning. Still at heaven's very gate will Schubert, spontaneous and impassional lark, outpour the melody he learned beneath that temple's overhanging roof, or else in the sacred limits of its inmost court.
Always we shall have with us those who in the name of progress turn the back on whatever is behind. Ignoring Aristotle's profound dictum that the real test of art is not originality, but its truth to the universal, these no doubt will ridicule as immature attempts, necessary to the adolescence of art, all that is greatest in German and Italian music. In addition to these we shall have that class of temperamental individuals who, from the extravagant and bizarre, derive that thrill of rapture which they mistake for appreciation: however, these fickle followers of fads and fashions cannot be reckoned among the adherents of legitimate art. Now as to the public, the great overwhelming body of the people; can they be educated to enjoy the new art of sound? Will they not refuse, aye, obstinately refuse to appreciate cacophony however judiciously employed? A difficult question this unless one remembers that, as the race advances, the foremost, coming into new vistas of Truth, bequeath to those next in line, and so on to the very rear, their own rare and high discovery.
In the comprehensive art of sound, the euphonious epitomizes the major, better half of man and nature. From this it appears that the cacophonious must epitomize the minor, baser half. Why, heretofore, was this half well-nigh denied tonal utterance? Was it not largely from the old and inadequate theological conception which made the existence of evil an abortion of the Divine plan?
Conceding the answer implied, and granting that the attitude of the time is one of invitation, let us consider certain factors necessary to the realization of the art of sound.
Orchestral music and orchestral accompaniment, as understood by Bach and Handel, betray a paucity of resource and a lack of color then inevitable. Since that era of small beginnings, and in late years especially, orchestral instruments both numerous and valuable have been invented, and the capacity of brass and wood-wind much enlarged and their quality greatly improved. Desirous of utilizing to the utmost all additions and improvements, orchestral composers sought effects the most novel both in solo and in symphony. As result the orchestra grew from infantile to gigantic proportions and capabilities. Thus was produced a full, flexible and characteristic means of expression, one peculiarly suited to the speculating and philosophizing musician who, already due and now appearing, added his contributions to those productive of a rounded art.
In examining the factors which make for Strauss and his works, we shall find that his native originality could never have raised him to what he is, and that the art of sound would still be an undiscovered one, had not Chopin already exemplified, most eloquently, the flexibility of the laws of chromatic progression, and had not Wagner, that great emancipator, stricken from musical form the cramping bonds of a narrow convention.
If, as we contend, the minor half of dual man and nature has legitimate place in all art, then let the musician beware lest, as final impression, he make evil seductive, and so identify himself with decadence as have those who denounce in every form of art any purpose consciously moral; those in fact who announce as their dictum, «Art for art's sake.» When for specific ends the musician weaves around evil a flowery spell, he somehow should make us feel that death and corruption lurk in every petal of those all-too-enticing blooms.
Moreover, when by means of cacophony he lays bare the true nature of evil, he should avoid an excess which would identify him with the moral pervert whose delight is in the abnormal. Let him understand that in this world's great school where, only amidst the lure of opposites, character can be formed and wisdom gained, the true office of evil and the secret of its permission is that eventually its inner hideousness will turn from itself, forever, those who, through ignorance of the essential nature of evil, have yielded to its manifold seductions.
Of all arts, music is accredited to be the highest and purest. The supreme art of the beautiful, it rests on a mathematical basis. Its notes and intervals and chords progress in compliance with defined, or at least definable laws corresponding to the great laws which, moving with mathematical precision, brought order from chaos and so created the world. Concerning the art of sound, this problem confronts us; what are the laws if any which govern the ugly? Or, to put it differently, to what extent does the ugliness of evil correspond to chaotic conditions?
If what the composer would depict is not governed by mathematical law, then is he warranted in the use of unresolved and unresolvable dissonances. Judged by this rule, Debussy has perhaps so transgressed that a wiser generation will pronounce his efforts to be a passing phase of æstheticism. But the difficulty of determining just what is, or is not governed by mathematical law, must lead to a deal of error ere we attain the true art of sound.
To illustrate the vast unlikeness of method in the descriptive instrumental works of the classical and those of the ultra-modern school, two examples will suffice. The representation of Chaos in Haydn's «Creation,» gave to the composer full opportunity for every liberty of harmony and form tolerated in his time. Now, while a rather frequent use of the diminished seventh chord lends to this composition somewhat of needed vagueness, still there are no modulations to distant keys, no abrupt transitions, no unresolved or unresolvable discords, no consecutive perfect fifths, and, in fact, there is nothing in the chord progression which the critic of to-day would deem daring or even unusual for, always and wholly, the harmonic scheme conforms to conventional rules. Here and there is somewhat of concession to established musical form, for, in this picture of Chaos, the employment of anything radical either in form or harmony, would have provoked censure the very harshest and even have proved the author guilty of the unpardonable sin of producing what could never be called music.
With this attempted realism of Haydn, compare now that portion of «Don Quixote» wherein Strauss delineates the gradual and complete disordering of the mind of Cervantes' hero. Wholly sure of his novel method, one, by the way, peculiarly adapted to the subject, Strauss avails himself of every conceivable liberty of tone and form. Euphony and cacophony mix in an astounding realism, while the rational sequence of sanctioned form gives way to the illogical and wholly fantastic, in fact the chaos of dethroned reason.
III
The subject of long experiment, Music, as we know it, at length emerged from the centuries, virtually a modern art. The fate of its founders and their followers for long after, is that the names of these are well-nigh forgotten, and their works are heard no more. Because of them the later comers have survived rich through inheritance, but perhaps no richer by nature.
Again has music reached the experimental stage. Sweeping upward in mighty spiral, and so conforming to creation's universal trend, now, at a point of departure overlooking the old, it finds inadequate that result of compromise, the diatonic scale. It faces the problem of tonality and those modern questions which a higher, wider outlook brings to view.
In estimating the value and longevity of Strauss' art, let us remember that the ancient experimenters in music evolved no definite types as Nature in her domain has done. Half-formed, their pale and bloodless attempts have perished from sheer lack of vitality. On the other hand, the tone-dramas of our most modern virtuoso are anything but anæmic; an all-too-turbulent flood rushes through their every vein. So much is Strauss a product of his time that the characteristics now placing him in the forefront would have little availed him in an age believing with Schumann that Harmony is king and Melody queen in the composer's realm.
Were Strauss endowed with a lyric gift comparable to that of Schubert, probably he would be impelled to exercise that gift almost within the compass of convention. Were he, like Handel, able to accomplish the majestic and the magical without recourse to chromatic progression, the bizarre would lead him less far afield. Again, were he capable of a kingdom like that wherein Beethoven, reigning by divine right, reigned supreme, surely he would not have sought the seemingly unfruitful wastes, the perhaps barren Saharas of sound. Deficient in the crowning qualities of these masters, but not deficient in genius, he imagined, and actually undertook with ardor, that of which they could never have dreamed.
Having accredited Strauss with genius, though of a peculiar sort, we are led, for the better understanding of this master, to ask, what is genius? To this query the wisdom of all ages has given various answers. According to Plato, a genius is one whose vision of Beauty, Truth, and Good, existing in the Divine Mind, is clearer than that of other men. Therefore genius does not actually originate. Its office is to translate, to reproduce the great originals, the eternal archetypes of the super-mundane world. Because of his high vision the artist reproduces Beauty, the philosopher Truth, while the saint, enamoured of Good, both teaches and practices it.
Granting this, we are at once led to ask, why the penetrating vision of genius? To this query a brief answer is that because the possibilities either latent or unfolding in man are immeasurable as the universe itself, therefore that which men are pleased to call genius is but the foreshowing of what the race as a whole shall attain to, but, in the present stage of human progress, genius is in fact a rare exception to Nature's slow and thorough methods. Nevertheless, the price of its defiance of the universal law must be paid by genius, and that price is unsymmetrical development.
Because of unsymmetrical development, genius may at times produce what, to the average normal being would seem the work of a degenerate mind; but in estimating Strauss it should be considered that the tonal interpreter of Don Quixote can often be sanely logical, and even wholly conventional.
The genius of Strauss, like that of Whitman, is essentially the genius of the explorer. Each of these burned to reach the limits of his art and plant victorious feet upon the pole. As in the material world, so here, such daring spirits are necessary if we would know the geography of the world of tone. To our old musical possessions, Strauss has joined a vast and as yet vague territory much of which, while of little present value, may yet develop unexpected and perhaps indispensable uses.
It argues against the real sanity of Strauss' art as a whole, that, for the exercise of his gifts, he chooses Oscar Wilde's version of the story of Salomé, a version in which the central theme is a monstrous and revolting passion unmatchable in actual life, and even unthinkable except by the sexual pervert. Also, it is ominous that Strauss undertakes the tonal treatment of the brilliantly written but illogical work, «Thus spake Zarathustra;» a work wherein is discovered the philosopher Neitzsche's ideal, the earth-shaping, earth-dominating man to be, a proud, unconcerned, scornful, violent, and fear-inspiring personage beloved of Wisdom the goddess woman that loves the warrior only. In this «Super Man» evolved evil and evolved good are necessary. Free from gods, and every adoration save that of self, he rises over unnumbered small folk and timorous weaklings, and that protection artfully invented for them by the Christian Church, «Slave Morality;» and so he attains his goal, «Master Morality,» that which, to all but the mind of the moral pervert, is the morality of the tyrant whose will none dares gainsay.
We have already contended that the wide departure of Strauss was natural and necessary to a genius lacking in certain gifts indispensable to the older schools; also we have accredited him with being a compound of various tendencies essentially modern. It may with assurance be affirmed that the art of sound could have originated only in a time like our own, a time whose methods are well illustrated by the attitude of certain of our modern novelists.
Having proved to themselves and their following the correctness of the new methods, and the falsity of the old, these have largely abandoned plot and incident, and devoted their talents to psychology. Now while it is incontestable that Walter Scott could by no means have brought to the trivial and the commonplace the analytical mind of Henry James, still we venture that the world has lost nothing because of this. The poor plodding world looks downward; so its eyes must again and again be diverted from the trivial and the commonplace, and lifted toward an ideal which, even if overdrawn, is immeasurably better than none.
While preferring to grope in the dark regions of the abnormal, the art of Strauss, the art of the modern psychologist has, as one might expect, often treated the trivial and the commonplace. Besides it is evident that neither in Salomé nor in «Thus spake Zarathustra» has it given to the world a normal ideal. With the great masters of the past it was always an ideal, the noblest within the range of their inspired vision. To Haydn it was the terrestrial Eden yet undarkened by the Fall. To Handel it was the Greater Adam, and His coming long foretold. To Bach it was Gethsemane, and its immortal, crowning passion of sorrow. To Mendelssohn it was the prophet and the saint those rich flowerings of his ancient race. To Wagner it was the eternal womanly prompting to noblest deeds of devotion and self-sacrifice.
With men like these, the presentation of high moral ideals resulted from intuitive knowledge that the perpetuity of mankind, as something nobler than the brute kingdom, depends upon acceptance of these ideals, and therefore any so-called masterpiece which brings about confusion of ideals, would render the real purpose of art abortive.
The music of such masters as Haydn and Mozart voices the pure emotions spontaneous in the breast of man. God-given emotions, never to be quenched, they will burst into utterance while throbs the human heart. The evolution of music, as of all art, accords with the evolution of man from a creature of primal impulses to one of a thousand involved emotions and interests. The latest methods of Strauss are fraught with peculiar peril to his art, as an epitome of life, in that a well-nigh exclusive use of obscure and chromatic harmonies is restricting that art to an expression of complex emotions only. Now, while through no composer however gifted can music revert to the prevailing simplicity of Handel, still, whatever its evolution, it must as an epitome of life, have moments of native and simple emotion. Therefore it was a sane and saving reaction which turned the efforts of Strauss from the abnormal to the smaller, more subdued models of the song writer, and also to that wholesome and human idyll, the Enoch Arden of Tennyson.
As an orchestral writer, Strauss has gathered to himself the technical knowledge of Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner. Having enlarged his resources through original discovery, he dazzles by display of a virtuosity wholly unprecedented. Technically he is fully equipped for exploration; and thus he is pushing on into that new hemisphere the realm of sound.
In our exposition we have endeavored to point out certain tendencies in the work of Strauss, tendencies which endanger realism in every art whatsoever, tendencies which we believe are turning Strauss from full and sane achievement, and so from his prospective goal the art of sound. That such an art is legitimate and actually within sight we have endeavored to show, as also the certainty that, once our possession, it will supplement and not supersede its predecessors. Failing to find in Strauss the lofty personage his worshippers deem him to be, we nevertheless have accredited him with real though peculiar genius, and this is but justice due. Living in a transition period largely of his own bringing about, he has produced both the unquestioned and the problematical. But that problematical can be ignored or forgotten no more than the problematical of Whitman. At very least, it will survive as a curiosity of tonal art.
In his theoretical writings on the opera and the drama, Wagner likens music to the soulless nymph, a real woman only through the love of some man. Poetry, to Wagner, is that masculine endowing music with an immortal part. This novel finding of the poet-musician is but the outcome of a theory; an outcome which the patent facts easily and wholly refute. Instrumental music when treated by a virile master, like Wagner himself, can be masculine enough, while, in the hands of a versifier gifted chiefly with grace and smoothness, Poetry, the masculine art so called, becomes weakly feminine, or even a characterless thing not attaining to sex.
Wagner's theories are founded on a philosophy essentially of Eastern origin, but, had he looked deeper, our speculator would have discovered that Eastern philosophy considers sex to be but an outward manifestation incident to the present stage of world evolution. The human soul, and also the soul of every art, contains within itself the potentiality of both male and female. Sex in the physical world is lack of equilibrium, the temporary preponderance in the soul of specific male or female characteristics outwardly exhibited, but, in the mental world, the offspring of highest genius would attain an equilibrium superior to distinction of sex.
In art, as in man its author, the masculine, untempered by the feminine, becomes not wisely masterful, but harsh and brutal; hence the peril of Strauss. The feminine, untempered by the masculine, becomes not intuitive, but weakly capricious and wholly illogical; hence the peril of Debussy. The great authors, whichever their sex, have produced works wherein specific male and female characteristics modify one another.
This view of sex in art makes for the validity of instrumental music as such, and reënforces the position of Strauss when, in his wholly instrumental tone poems, he would delineate every phase of life, and even certain phases of philosophic thought as Wagner, despite theory, has done in his «Faust Overture.»
Owing to the increasing vogue of Strauss, no prophet is necessary to foretell a rank growth of imitators. These, because barren of originality, will succeed in copying the eccentricities rather than the merits of their model. What infliction, what torture to human ears will result from the inevitable Bedlam of noise and fury, the near future must reveal. But let us believe that a modicum of pity and saving common sense, in even the most cruel devotee of such a school, will insure speedy reaction toward saner and more satisfying methods.
While ignoring not its old estate, music is moving from its centre in the emotional nature, to a stronghold well within the intellectual life. Failures and wanderings indeed must be, but stagnation never in this onward world. So, looking to desired fulfillment, let us prophesy of music such rise as that of man from his emotional, half-formed self toward an ideal not coldly intellectual, but always warmly and nobly human with what the future foreshadows, namely, the balanced blending of emotion and mind, the ideal of both man and his artistic creations, in fact, the ideal of ideals in whose very anticipation is forgotten the «Super Man» of Nieztsche.