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!