"Till Eulenspiegel."
February 14, 1902.
"Till Eulenspiegel" was the great mediæval farceur. His name is well known to students of folk-lore. In Flemish books it figures as Thyl Uylenspiegel, in English as Till Owlglass. Like other heroes of popular story, Till lies buried in more than one place, each of his tombstones being adorned with his armorial bearings—an owl perched on a hand-mirror. He originated and, for the most part, lived in Westphalia or some country of the Lower Rhine; but he was a migratory person, and one of his best authenticated exploits occurred in Poland, where he had a contest of skill with the King's professional jester. Till is the incarnation of mockery and satire and buffoonery, sometimes witty and usually coarse. He represents a literary development that may be regarded as a kind of Scherzo, after the Andante of the Troubadours, Minnesingers, and other courtly poets—the inevitable reaction of the popular spirit against too much high-flown sentiment. The legendary figure of Till has appealed with the most extraordinary results to that composer who first brought into the domain of the musical art the specific qualities of the South German imagination, as represented, for example, by Holbein, Dürer, and Adam Krafft. Incisive, graphic, ornate, and with no less unheard-of power of characterisation is Richard Strauss in his music than those other masters in their graphic or plastic achievements. His "Till" reminds one of Dürer's woodcut illustrations to the Apocalypse, but, of course, with colour added. And what colour! and what characterisation in the colour! He controls the orchestra precisely as a good actor the tones of his own voice. He can make it render the finest shades of emotion. "Till" is a musical miracle, unlocking the springs of laughter and of tears at the same time. It enlarges one's notions of what is possible in music, so multifarious and inconceivable are the drolleries, so prodigious the technical audacities which the composer succeeds in justifying. Strauss has, in a sense, revived an art said to have existed in the ancient world—the telling of a story in the form of a dance. From the point where that chromatic jig is heard which symbolises Till wandering about in search of material for the exercise of his talents, the imagination is spell-bound.
Strauss goes a distinct point beyond Wagner in the articulateness of his musical phrases, and he knows better than any other composer that it is the special province of music to express what cannot be expressed in any other way—what is too delicate, or too indelicate, to be expressed in any other way. The most wonderful quality of "Till" is its mediævalism. Listen to those triplets, in four-part chromatic harmony for five solo violins with sordini, expressing the agony of terror into which Till is thrown by his own wicked mockery of religion. By such devices the composer conjures up the atmosphere of the age, characterised by "Furcht auf der Gasse, Furcht im Herzen." The treatment of the prologue and epilogue, where all that is blackguardly is taken out of Till's themes now that he has become a story, is of inconceivable felicity.