There are many to whom Richard Strauss’s tone-poem Ein Heldenleben proved musically baneful. Yet Strauss wears no mask. His own musical lineaments, convulsed in passion’s grimace, exultant with grandiose dreams, or distorted by deadly rage, are the naked expression of his fantastic soul. And to the orthodox his contempt for clear tonalities, his mockery of the very harmonic foundations of the art, his juggling with bizarre rhythms—in a word, his avoidance of the normal, the facile, the smug, and the unoriginal, is as great a crime against ethics as the lucidly insane proclamations of the Master Immoralist, Friedrich Nietzsche. Repeated hearings convince one regarding Strauss’s sincerity. He is working out his own artistic salvation on his own premeditated lines. He is the solitary soul of Hauptmann, and he is doomed to mockery until he is understood.
It is impossible to escape the compelling magnetism of the man from Munich. He is still young, still in his storm and stress period. When the time for clarification comes, Strauss in this final analysis will emerge a very big man. His Hero’s Life has its ugly spots—critics and criticism are objectified in a cruelly sardonic fashion—and that battlefield will remain for this generation either sheer brutal noise or else the forefront of the higher æstheticism in music. One way or the other it matters little; the reputation of Strauss will not stand or fall by this poem. The main thing to record is the overwhelming impression of power, anarchistic if you will, that informs Ein Heldenleben. And all the more disquieting is the discovery that this Wizard of Dreams wears no antique musical mask—his own is tragic and significant enough.
And let it be said that for conventional programme music Strauss has ever manifested a violent aversion. The only clew he gives to his work is the title. Some commentators do the most mischief, for they read into this music every imaginable meaning. It is then as absolute music that Ein Heldenleben may be criticised, though the names of the various subdivisions give the hearer, if not a key, at least notion of the emotional trend of this composition. This is the way Richard Strauss has outlined the scheme of his E flat Symphony, opus 40, his Eroica:—
I. The Hero. II. The Hero’s Antagonists. III. The Hero’s Consort. IV. The Hero’s Battlefield. V. The Hero’s Work of Peace. VI. The Hero’s Retirement from Worldly Life and Strife and Ultimate Perfection. It must be remembered that this is a purely arbitrary arrangement, for in the formal sense the ground plan of the symphony would be thus: The first three sections contain the thematic statements; the next two—parts four and five—are devoted to the exposition or free fantasia; the last is a highly elaborate summing up or coda. Here is the symphonic form in an attenuated shape, the chief novelty being the introduction in part five—or second division of the working-out section of new thematic material, modest quotations from the Strauss earlier symphonic works. There can then be no doubt as to the identity of the protagonist of this drama-symphony—it is the glorified image of Richard Strauss. This latter exploitation of personality need not distress us unnecessarily; Strauss but follows in the footsteps of Walt Whitman and of his own contemporaries—Rodin, the sculptor; Gabriel d’Annunzio, in Il Fuoco; Nietzsche, in Zarathustra; Tolstoy, in all his confessions—despite their inverted humility; Wagner, in Meistersinger; Franz Stuck, the Munich painter, whose portrait of his own eccentric self is not the least of his work. Strauss might appreciatively quote Walt Whitman: “Am I of mighty Manhattan the son?” as a justification of what paradoxically could be called his objective egotism. But the composer not only deifies the normal man, he shadows forth Nietzsche’s supernormal humanity. He is a very Victor Hugo in his colossal egotism, yet he names it the ego of mankind. So avoiding all this pother of philosophy and æsthetics, one is forced to return to the music as poetic music.
The Hero theme is Beethovian in its diatonic majesty—the entire section has a Beethoven color, despite its dissonantal interruptions—while the second section, an amiable picture of the composer’s adversaries, suggests in a triturated manner the irony, caricature, and burlesque spirit of Till Eulenspiegel. His critical adversaries are represented as a snarling, sorry crew, with acrid and acrimonious souls, duly set forth by the woodwind instruments, chiefly the oboe; there is also a horrid sounding phrase, empty fifths for tenor and bass tuba. Then the hero’s wife is pictured by the solo violin. It is very feminine. It mounts in passion and interest with the duologue. After that—chaos! It is but the developing of the foregoing motives. And such an exposition, it is safe to say, has never been heard since saurians roared in the steaming marshes of the young planet, or when prehistoric man met in multitudinous and shrieking combat. Yet the web is polyphonically spun—spun magnificently. This battle scene is full of unmitigated horror. One knows that it is the free fantasia, but such a one has never been conceived before by the mind of man. A battle is not a peaceful or a pleasant place, especially a modern battlefield. You can dimly, after several hearings, thread the thematic mazes, but so discordant are the opposing tonalities, so screaming the harmonies, and so highly pitched the dynamic scheme, that the normal ear, thus rudely assaulted, becomes bewildered and finally insensitive. Strauss has not a normal ear. His is the most marvelous agglomeration of cortical cells that science has ever recorded. So acute are his powers of acoustical differentiation that he must hear, not alone tones beyond the base and the top of the normal scale unheard of by ordinary humans, but he must also hear, or, rather, overhear, the vibratory waves from all individual sounds. His music gives us the impression of new overtones, of scales that violate the well tempered, of tonalities that approximate to the quarter-tones of Oriental music. And yet there is, besides the barbaric energy displayed, grandeur in the conception of this extraordinary battle piece. It evokes the picture of countless and waging hosts; of forests of waving spears and clashing blades. The din, heat, and turmoil of conflict are spread over all and the ground piled high with the slain.
It is all too intricate to grasp at several hearings, though it may become child’s play for the next generation. Richard Wagner’s case must not be forgotten at this point. So complex is the counterpoint of Strauss that one of his commentators recommends the all but impossible feat of listening to it horizontally and vertically. In the fifth part we hear themes from the composer’s Don Juan, Macbeth, Death and Apotheosis, Till Eulenspiegel, Zarathustra, Don Quixote, Guntram, and his lovely song, Traum durch die Dämmerung. With the coda, after some sinister retrospection of an agitated life, comes peace, pastoral, soul-renewing. And the big E flat chord that closes the volume is worth the entire composition. It is the most magnificent and imposing rainbow of tone that ever spanned the harmonic heavens. Not Wagner’s wonderful C major chord, which begins the Meistersinger overture, is comparable to the iridescence of this Uebermensch’s sonorous valedictory. Strauss has not hesitated to annex some themes from Parsifal and Tristan; there is, indeed, much Wagner in the score. But do not call this man a madman, a décadent—unless by décadent you mean the expression in its literary sense as in an undue devotion to the letter at the expense of the word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, page, chapter, and book. He has great energy, great power of concentration; and his critics—those he so caustically portrays as snarling and cynical in his very Till-Eulenspiegel-like second section—those critics, we repeat, must admit the man’s skill in scoring, in contrapuntal mastery. Whether all this monumental labor is worth the trouble; whether the very noticeable disproportion—spiritual and physical—between the themes and their handling; whether these things are to defy established canonic conventions and live by virtue of their characteristic truth and tonal beauty,—are considerations I gratefully relinquish to the next generation. Naturally there is repellent music in the score; but then the neo-realists insist on truth, not on the pursuit of vague and decorative beauty. It is the characteristic versus the ornamental; and who shall dare predict its future success or extinction? One thing must be insisted upon—the absolute abandonment of the old musical ideal, else Strauss and his tendencies go by the board. The well-sounding, the poetic,—in the romantic sense,—are thrown to the winds in this monstrous orgy; an organized orgy in the Balzac meaning of the phrase—for Strauss is only mad north-northwest, and can always tell a harmonic hawk from a hernshaw. In his most delirious moments he remembers his orchestral palette. And what a gorgeous, horrible color scheme is his! He has a taste for sour progressions, and every voice in his orchestral family is forced to sing impossible and wicked things. He owes much to Beethoven, Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner,—the Wagner of Tristan and Parsifal,—and often he compasses both beauty and grandeur.
The Strauss tone-poems are dramas without words. What Tschaïkowsky so eloquently executed as single figures in the character studies of Romeo and Juliet, Francesca da Rimini, Hamlet, and Manfred, Richard Strauss expands to the compass of a psychical tonal drama, dispensing with words, with actions, with the machinery of the stage, just as the great masters of fiction supplanted the makers of epics and their supernatural furniture by a synthesis in which action, dialogue, description, comment, are melted into homogeneous narrative. Every instrument in the Strauss orchestra is an actor that speaks its lines solo or during an amazing polyphony. After Don Quixote one need not be told that Strauss is not a mere Tintoretto of the orchestra; he is, I am not loath to repeat, both painter and psychologist. As the greatest narrator in modern prose is Gustave Flaubert, so Richard Strauss is the greatest of musical narrators. There is no longer any question of form in the classic sense; every music symbol and device hitherto known in the art of music is utilized and reënforced by the invention of numberless methods for driving home to the imagination the Old-World tale of Don Quixote and his squire. It may be objected here that the story of Cervantes should suffice without any of the sonorous exfoliations of this composer. Very true. But Strauss only uses Don Quixote as he uses Zarathustra or Don Juan, as a type of something that may be discovered in all humanity. Don Quixote the perfect dreamer may be the Knight of Cervantes or our next-door neighbor. More terrible still, he may be our true self masked by the dull garb of life’s quotidian struggle for bread! And to offset the fantasy of the knight we have the homely wisdom of Sancho Panza, who, having barked his shins as well as warmed them at the grate of life, always speaks by the card. A sensible fool, he is not understood by the foolish sensitivist, the poet who looks aloft and therefore misses the prizes beloved of most men.
Why is not this a theme fit for musical development? It has every element dear to the heart of the poetic composer—fantasy, poetry, broad, obvious humor, realism, nobility of idea, and an almost infinite number of surfaces fit for the loving brush of a master painter. Then there is the psychology. Don Quixote, half-mad, chivalric withal, must be depicted; as a counterfoil the obese humors of Sancho Panza are ready for celebration. After subjecting this pair to the minutest musical scrutiny, their voyages and adventures must be duly set forth. It is evident that here we are confronted by many difficulties. It is no longer a question of mere musicianship. Form is a thing of the grammarians, to be discussed behind closed doors by persons who believe in musty counterpoint and the rules of the game. A great vital imagination, defying alike gods and men and capable of shaping his dreams, a man of humor, malice, irony, above all else irony, tenderness, pity, and the marrow of life, love,—all these qualities, plus an infernal (or celestial if you like the word better) science, must the composer of a Don Quixote possess.
Strauss calls his work “Fantastic variations on a theme, of knightly character.” For the benefit of the musically pious let me add that it is in the form—broadly—of a Thema con Variazione and Finale. Therein Strauss may be said to mock his own idealism, as Heine and Nietzsche once mocked theirs. The realism is after all a realism of fantasy; for the narrative deals with what the Knight of the Rueful Countenance imagined and with what his trusty squire thought of him. With his characteristic flair for an apt subject, Strauss recognized in the semi-dream-life of Don Quixote a theme pat for treatment—and how he has treated it! That magnificent gift of irony, inherent in every sentence he utters, here expands in a soil worthy of it. A garden of curious and beautiful flowers—flowers of evil as well as good—blooms in this score. Its close contains some affecting and noble pages, as affecting as Tschaïkowsky’s, as dignified and dramatic as Richard Wagner’s. There is no interruption in the different sections. Don Quixote is “enacted” by the solo violoncello, the viola represents Sancho Panza. (Perhaps Strauss indulged in a sly witticism at the expense of the romantic Berlioz and his viola solo in Harold in Italy.) We first see—some hear, others see—Don Quixote reading crack-brained romances of chivalry. There are themes grandiose, mock heroic and crazy in their gallantry. Queer harmonies from time to time indicate the profound mental disturbance of the knight. He envisages the ideal woman; giants attack her; he rushes to the rescue. The muting of the instruments, tuba included, produces the idea of slow-creeping madness and a turbulent comminglement of ideas. Suddenly his reason goes, and with a crazy glissando on the harps and a mutilated version of the knightly theme the unfortunate man becomes quite mad. From music to madness is but a step after all. Don Quixote is now Knight Errant.