"Ein Heldenleben,"
Liverpool Orchestral Soc.
Feb. 8, 1904.
We have here to deal with the latest phase of Strauss, and to arrive at anything like a true estimate of "Heldenleben" we have to remember that Strauss is a reformer and the recognised leader of a party which, whether we like it or not, has played and is playing a great part in the world of music. The central principle of the Strauss school rests upon the perfectly correct observation that the general development of music during the last two centuries shows continual progress towards greater articulateness, and that there is no reason for regarding that progress as having reached its final stage with Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner. Brahms and the neo-classicists were on a wrong track, they consider, and it is the mission of Strauss and his connection to bring the art back into the paths of true progress. This indicates the sense in which Strauss is called a reformer. It is the usual fate of reformers to overshoot the mark; Mr. Weingartner thinks that Strauss has done so very seriously in his last three Symphonic Poems—"Zarathustra," "Don Quixote," and "Heldenleben,"—and I am constrained to give in my adherence to Mr. Weingartner's view. In each of the three works named there is much that only genius could have produced, but also something that is alien to genius. The perpetration of deliberate cacophony for a symbolical purpose we first encounter in "Zarathustra," where it is done in a tentative and restrained manner and on a very small scale. In "Don Quixote" the same procedure is used on a larger scale and with much greater boldness, and in "Heldenleben" it has given rise, in the "battle" section, to an extended movement that I can only call an atrocity. That section displays the composer in a mood of unparalleled extravagance. Taking harmony in the most extended sense that is possible, it still remains a thing outside the limits of which Strauss's battle-picture lies. It therefore fails altogether, I suggest, to carry on the progress of music towards greater articulateness. It is not music, and does nothing whatever for music. It is a monstrous excrescence and blemish—a product of musical insanity, bearing no trace whatever of that genius which produced the lovely and perfect "Tod und Verklärung" and the superbly racy and pithy orchestral Scherzo "Till Eulenspiegel."
The expression of such views carries with it the terrible consequence of being identified with "The Adversaries," whom Strauss, disarming criticism by a novel method, symbolises in the awful strains quoted as examples 4 and 5 in Mr. Newman's programme. But one must testify according to one's convictions, and I confess that I cannot be reconciled to section 4 of "Heldenleben," and find in section 5 a considerable element of merely curious mystification. The principle of "horizontal listening," which the whole-hog-going Straussians recommend, does not help me. Horizontal listening becomes, beneath the murderous cacophony of that battle section, simply supine listening.
In other parts of the work there is much that is thoroughly worthy of Strauss. Perhaps the most attractive thing of all is the violin solo representing the feminine element in the hero's life-experience. The wayward emotion of that part is rendered by the composer with a truly magical touch that shows with what wonderful freshness he conceives the task of such character-delineation in tones. How different from Chopin's princesses is the Straussian lady! How infinitely more subtle, varied, interesting, and psychologically true! The hero, too, is powerfully sketched, though throughout the section specially devoted to him one is conscious of the gigantic rather than the heroic. Most of the thematic invention is telling—perhaps more so than in "Zarathustra,"—and the "Seelenmalerei" in the love music and afterwards in the renunciation music is all very finely done. Even the drastic musical satire of the "Adversaries" is acceptable enough in its earlier phases. It is the polyphony in the sections of storm and stress that goes wrong. The subject of the work as a whole has the merit of general intelligibleness. But the composer identifies the hero much too insistently with himself; nor does he maintain the consistency of tone that is proper to a work of art. If sections 3, 4, 5 and 6 carried out the promise of sections 1 and 2 we should have a sort of gigantic Gulliverian humoresque. But with section 3 a new atmosphere is conjured up, and henceforth the work gravitates backwards and forwards between two irreconcilable elements—the one drastic, sarcastic, and cataplastic, the other at first subtle, sinuous, and soulful, and afterwards turning towards a mood of religious exaltation and austere contemplation.