Woe speaks: Vanish!
Ten!
Yet all joy wants eternity—
Eleven!
Wants deep, deep eternity!
Twelve!
But Strauss chooses this symbol as the time when Zarathustra begins his journey into eternity. The hour of midnight is the hour of death, the goal of Zarathustra’s career. This episode is an emotional parallel to the period when Zarathustra is felled to earth with conflicting longings. And the Theme of Disgust here stands forth as the Motif of Death, controlling the scene. Zarathustra’s earthly death is wonderfully translated into tone. The Theme of Death struggles with that of earthly strife, and both succumb in a broken chord of C major. Then without any modulation the Theme of the Ideal sounds in B major and the transfiguration is achieved. Again there is a faint reminiscent plea of the conquered themes. The Theme of the Ideal sways aloft in the higher regions in B major; the trombones insist on the cryptic unresolved chord of C-E-F sharp; and in the double basses and celli is repeated C-G-C—the World Riddle. Emil Paur, ever an ardent Strauss pioneer, produced Also sprach Zarathustra in New York, December, 1897.
In W. B. Yeats’s Ideas of Good and Evil, there appears this characteristic passage: “Have not poetry and music arisen, as it seems, out of the sounds the enchanters made to help their imagination to enchant, to charm, to bind with a spell themselves and the passers-by? These very words, a chief part of all praises of music or poetry, still cry to us their origin.” The Irish mystic poet is writing of magic, and I cannot help applying his words to Richard Strauss, who is the initiator of new art. After hearing his Till Eulenspiegel conducted by the composer, I was more than ever impressed by the idea that Strauss is diverting music into psychologic channels, moulding its plastic forms into shapes that are really vital, so intense is their personal appeal. Since primitive man howled his lays to the moon, the art of music has become in every age more and more definitive; even the classic masters were not content to play alone with tonal arabesques, but sought to impress upon their bars a definite mood. In Beethoven the passion for articulating his meanings literally re-created music. When Wagner found that he had nothing new to say, he resorted to an old device—he wedded his music to words. Richard Strauss has now taken up the chain, the last links of which were so patiently forged by Franz Liszt. He has at his command all the old enchantments of music; he can woo and ravish the ear and command the tempests; but this is not enough. He would have his message still more articulate. He is a thinker, a philosopher as well as a poet, and deeply religious in the cosmical sense; he purposes no less a task than the complete subjugation of men’s imagination. Notes, phrases, groups, movements, masses of tone are no longer merely sensuous symbols, but the actual symbols of a language; we must hasten to learn the new speech, which relates in wonderful tones wonderful things. Tschaïkowsky aimed at this definiteness, but his passionate, emotional nature clouded the workings of his intellect. Strauss, too, has had the seven devils of sensuality in his mansion, but has exorcised them by sheer force of a great spiritual nature—the man is a spiritualist, a seer in the broader meanings of these much-worn terms. The vision of approaching death in his Don Quixote could have been conceived only by one for whom life and the universe itself were symbols, the living garment by which we apprehend the Deity.
In our shrewd categories of things intellectual and things emotional, we partition off too sharply brain and feeling, soul and body. Life is not a proposition by Euclid; nor is art. It is one of the functions of music to make us feel, another to make us think; the greatest masters are ever those who make us both feel and think in one vivid moment. This Beethoven has done, Wagner has done, and now Richard Strauss. You cannot call his music frigidly intellectual, as is often the music of Brahms, nor does it relapse into such debauches of frenetic passion as Tschaïkowsky’s—the imperial intellect of Strauss controls his temperament. He is, like Nietzsche, a lyric philosopher, but never, like Nietzsche, will he allow the problems of life and art to overthrow his reason. In the thunders of his scores, I seem to hear the annunciation of a new dispensation, of a new evangel of art which shall preach the beauty of the soul and the beauty of body; life on the other side of good and evil.