"Faust Symphonie,"
Düsseldorf.
May 23, 1902.
The many violent anti-Lisztians in England should be particularly careful just now to keep their powder dry. They are going to have great trouble with this Eulenspiegelisch Mr. Strauss. A considerable group of English visitors heard his interpretation of the "Faust Symphonie" on Monday evening, and they are not likely to forget it. Strauss does not belong to the small group of international conductors who can travel from place to place, commanding success everywhere and in music of every style. He has not studied conductor's deportment carefully enough to be generally pleasing to the public. At the same time, his demonic talent comes out clearly enough in his conducting when he has to deal with some work that makes a special appeal to his sympathies. It seems to be his mission to justify Liszt after decades of misunderstanding and detraction. His rendering of the "Faust Symphonie" was simply a gigantic success. The stress and anguish of the first movement, the wonderful sweetness and charm of the Gretchen music, the almost incredible incisiveness and pregnancy of the characteristic music in the Mephistopheles section of the finale, and the unparalleled grandeur of the concluding idea, where the mask is torn from the face of the "spirit that denies" and the "chorus mysticus" enters with the final stanza, leading up to the crowning idea of the whole drama, "Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan"—these beauties and splendours of the composition were revealed with the infallible touch of a master into whose flesh and blood it long ago passed: and the audience, including even the English visitors, felt it. The "Faust Symphonie" declares the composer to be, in his attitude towards art and life, akin to Hugo, Delacroix, and the other great French Romantics, and the result of that attitude seems more completely happy in music than in painting or literature. It makes one look back with envious longing to the freshness and abounding vitality of those fellows who found such huge relish in the great, broad, fundamental human themes, and resources so vast in the treatment of them. It also provokes bewildered reflections on the complex and enigmatic personality of the composer, who, for all his religious orthodoxy, was a more tremendous revolutionary in art than Wagner, and was, in fact, the originator of certain particularly fruitful Wagnerian ideas. All this and much more is to be learned from the Liszt interpretations of Strauss—a sphinx-like person who, as his abnormally big head sways on the top of his tall and bulky figure, to the accompaniment of fantastic gestures, works up his audience into a sort of phosphorescent fever, here and there provoking a process of sharp self-examination.