"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.
"Sehnsucht."
March 18, 1902.
Richard Strauss's song "Sehnsucht," raises a good many interesting questions, such as whether it is not, after all, on harmony rather than on tone-colouring that the essential quality of Strauss's music depends; whether the eminent South German composer would have found it necessary to be so persistently galvanic in his procedure had he not addressed a musical generation that is too fond of taking opium with Tchaïkovsky; whether it is with Eulenspieglish intent that he sets so many unsophisticated love-song texts to music that betrays contempt of mere lyrism, or whether he genuinely misunderstands the trend of his own talent. Thus one might continue indefinitely; for it is the regular effect of Strauss's music to crook the listener's mind into one huge note of interrogation. One further and more important question must, however, be added. Is it Strauss's deliberate intention to abolish rhythm? Would he add to the well-known saying, "Am Anfang war der Rhythmus" the rider "aber jetzt nicht mehr?" The over-strongly salted and too highly flavoured "Sehnsucht" was admirably sung, and the fascination of it, not unmixed with horror, was such that it had to be repeated. Nothing about Strauss is more disquieting than his after-effect on the musical palate. Whether one likes his style or not, any other sounds are tame by contrast with it, and a naïf and mild composer such as Grieg (the Hans Andersen of music) seems almost bread-and-butter.
"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.