I
Richard Strauss said of his work when it was produced in Berlin, December, 1896: “I did not intend to write philosophical music or portray Nietzsche’s great work musically. I meant to convey musically an idea of the development of the human race from its origin, through the various phases of development, religious as well as scientific, up to Nietzsche’s idea of the Uebermensch. The whole symphonic poem is intended as my homage to the genius of Nietzsche, which found its greatest exemplification in his book, Thus Spake Zarathustra.”
For me the beginning is like Michel Angelo’s Last Judgment, or the birth of a mighty planet; its close has the dreary quality of modern art, profoundly sad and enigmatic. There is no God for Strauss, there is no God in Tschaïkowsky’s last symphony and there was no God for Nietzsche, no God but self.
You have Strauss’ point of view, have you not? He disclaims making any attempt to set philosophy to tones; indeed Wagner’s failure in Tristan and the Ring to ensnare Schopenhauer’s metaphysic was sufficient warning for the younger man. The whole undertaking stands and falls upon the question: Is Also Sprach Zarathustra good music? I set aside now all considerations of orchestral technic—a technic that leaves Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner gaping aghast in the rear—and propose only the consideration of Strauss’ thematic workmanship. Let it be at once conceded that he does not make beautiful music, that his melodies are unmelodious, even ugly, when subjected to the classic or romantic tests—call it classic and be done, for Schumann, Chopin, Liszt and Wagner are classics—and we have now further narrowed the argument to a question of the characteristic or veristic in melody making, and this is the crux of the situation.
Has Richard Strauss, then, made characteristic music, and how has its character conformed with his own dimly outlined programme—not Dr. Riemann’s elaborate analytical scheme?
“I did not intend to write philosophical music,” he said. Of course not; it were impossible; but some of the raw elements of philosophy are in the poem; keen, overwhelming logic, sincerity, orbic centrality, and hints of the microcosm and the macrocosm of music. Strauss set out to accomplish what has never before been accomplished in or out of the world, and he has failed, and the failure is glorious, so glorious that it will blind a generation before its glory is apprehended; so glorious that it blazes a new turn in the path made straight by Beethoven, Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner!
Wagner sought the aid of other arts, and sang his Schopenhauer in gloomy tones; Strauss, relying on the sheer audacity of the instrumental army, chants of the cosmos, of the birth of atoms, of the religious loves, hates, works, doubts, joys and sorrows of the atom, would fain deluge us with an epitome of the world processes, and so has failed. But what colossal daring! What an imagination! What poetic invention!
The authors of Genesis, of the Book of Job, of the Songs of Solomon, the Apocalypse, the Iliad, the Sermon on the Mount, the Koran, the Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Shakespeare’s plays, Faust, the Ninth Symphony and Tristan, all rolled into one would have failed too, before such a stupendous task.
Now, perhaps we may reach a comparative estimate of the glory involved in Richard Strauss’ half-mad, idealistic failure.
Putting aside Riemann as a hopelessly involved guide—a baleful ignis-fatuus in a midnight forest,—Strauss’ poem impressed me, after three hearings, as the gigantic torso of an art work for the future. Euphony was hurled to the winds, the Addisonian ductility of Mozart, the Théophile Gautier coloring of Schumann, Chopin’s delicate romanticism, all were scorned as not being truthful enough for the subject in hand, and the subject is not a pretty or a sentimental one. Strauss, with his almost superhuman mastery of all schools, could have written with ease in the manner of any of his predecessors, but, like a new Empedocles on Ætna, preferred to leap into the dark, or rather into the fiery crater of truth. In few bars did I discover an accent of insincerity, a making of music for the mere sake of music. He has leaped where Liszt feared to venture, and Strauss is Liszt’s descendant as well as Wagner’s. He cast aside all makeshifts, even the human voice, which is the human interest, and dared, with complicated virtuosity, to tell the truth—his truth, be it remembered—and so there is little likelihood of his being understood in this century.
It were madness to search for Nietzsche in Strauss—that is, in this score. It is un-Nietzsche music—Nietzsche who discarded Wagner for Bizet, Beethoven for Mozart. Schopenhauer, it may be remembered, laughed at Wagner the musician, played the flute and admired Rossini!
If Nietzsche, clothed in his most brilliant mind, had sat in the Metropolitan Opera House of New York City on the occasion of the first performance of his poem by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, December, 1897, he would probably have cried aloud: “I have pronounced laughter holy,” and then laughed himself into the madhouse. Poor, unfortunate, marvellous Nietzsche! But it is Strauss mirroring his own moods after feeding full on Nietzsche, and we must be content to swallow his title, “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” when in reality it is “Thus Spake Richard Strauss!”
The first theme—Zarathustra’s, intoned by four trumpets—is solemnly prodigious; probably the dwellers in the rear world theme meant something to the composer. You see he has us on the hip; either accept his symbols or not; you have your choice, you believers in programme music; to me it was lugubriously shuddersome. I liked the beautiful A flat melody; it was almost a melody, and the yearning motive was tremendously exciting. In the section, Joys and Passions, the violins and ’celli sweep in mountainous curves of passion—never except in Wagner has this molten episode been equalled—and then the ground began to slip under my feet. I grasped at the misty shadows of the grave song, and the tortuous and wriggling five voice fugue in Science seemed like some loathsome, footless worm. The dance chapter is shrilly bacchanalian. It may be the Over-Man dancing, but no human ever trod on such scarlet tones.
And the waltz melody! why, it is as common as mud, and intentionally so, but it is treated with Promethean touches. When I reached the part called the Song of the Night Wanderer, I renounced Bach, Beethoven and Brahms and became maddeningly intoxicated—not with joy, but with doubt, despair and defiance. Never shall I forget that screaming trumpet as it cut jaggedly across the baleful gloom! Sinister beyond compare was the atmosphere, and I could have cried aloud with Dante:
“Lo, this is Dis!”
I understood the divine laughter of Hell, and it surely was Dis that held its sides and cackled infernally! When we had reached the rim of eternity, “the under side of nothing,” as Daudet would have said, there the “twelve strokes of the heavy, humming bell”:
One!
O Man, take heed!
Two!
What speaks the deep midnight?
Three!
I have slept, I have slept—
Four!
I have awaked out of a deep dream:—
Five!
The world is deep,
Six!
And deeper than the day thought.
Seven!
Deep is its woe—
Eight!
Joy, deeper still than heart sorrow:
Nine!
Woe speaks: Vanish!
Ten!
Yet all joy wants eternity—
Eleven!
Wants deep, deep eternity!
Twelve!
Where is Hell-Breughel, painter, or Kapellmeister Kreisler, composer, after this weltering symphony of sin, sorrow and cruel passions? Their symbolism seems crude and childish, although Hoffman’s musician was certainly a forerunner of Strauss.
There is one thing I cannot understand. If the Wagnerians and the Lisztianer threw overboard old forms in obedience to their masters, why can they not accept the logical outcome of their theories in Strauss? If you pitch form to the devil, there must be a devil to pitch it to. Strauss is the most modern of the devils, and to the old classical group he would be the reductio ad absurdum of the movement that began with Beethoven. Do you hear? Beethoven! To assert that his shoulders are not broad enough to wear the mantle of Liszt, I can only ask why? Liszt seems jejune when it comes to covering an orchestral canvas of the size of Strauss’s. Strauss is his natural musical son, and the son has quite as much to say thematically as the father, while in the matter of brush brilliancy, massing of color, startling figure drawing—witness Don Juan and Til Eulenspiegel—and swift thinking, Strauss is easily the superior. He has not Wagner’s genius; far from it; yet, as Otto Floersheim said: “Also Sprach Zarathustra” is “the greatest score penned by man.” It is a cathedral in architectonic and is dangerously sublime, dangerously silly, with grotesque gargoyles, hideous flying abutments, exquisite traceries, fantastic arches half gothic, half infernal, huge and resounding spaces, gorgeous façades and heaven splitting spires. A mighty structure, and no more to be understood at one, two or a dozen visits than the Kölner Dom.
It lacks only simplicity of style; it is tropical, torrential, and in it there is the note of hysteria. It is complex with the diseased complexity of the age, and its strivings are the agonized strivings of a morbid Titan. Truthful? aye, horribly so, for it shows us the brain of a great man, overwrought by the vast emotional problems of his generation.
Also Sprach Zarathustra should be played once every season, and the audience be limited to poets, musicians and madmen. The latter, being Over-Men, would grasp its sad truths. And as I write I hear the key of B major and the key of C major and those three cryptic sinister Cs pizzicato at the close, and ask myself if, after all, Nietzsche and Strauss are not right, “Eternity’s sought by all delight—eternity deep—by all delight.”