Brecher assigns only six periods to the development of his hero. Brahms has much to say in the early Strauss music. The critic outlines the orchestra before Strauss came: Haydn was the first real instrumental writer, one who dispensed with the vocal character; Mozart lent the orchestra freedom and beauty; Beethoven endowed it with individuality; Berlioz was all color; Liszt, patterning after Berlioz, developed thematic variety; and Wagner employed both the color of Berlioz and Liszt’s theme-weaving for his profounder and more poetically dramatic music. Strauss followed all these men, but returned to pure instrumental forms, avoiding in his later poems the stringent outlines of the absolute scheme, and being more eloquent than his predecessors. Macbeth and Don Juan belong, says Brecher, to the third period of Strauss. Death and Apotheosis is a reactionary period, as is Guntram—too much Liszt and Wagner, too much chromaticism. From opus 27 to 34 is the fifth period, nearly all songs, wonderful songs. Till Eulenspiegel belongs to this arbitrary grouping, and it closes with Also sprach Zarathustra. The sixth period opens with Don Quixote and Heldenleben. Beauty is routed by truth. Even Urban thinks Don Quixote is a colossal joke, written to astound the Philistines.
But these writers are in sympathy with the composer. The terrible Hanslick of Vienna is not. He, even at the expense of contradicting himself, praised Wagner’s melodic gifts as an offset to the more meagre thematic invention of Strauss. His criticism of Also sprach Zarathustra is not criticism—it is scarification. He heard the work in Vienna, on a programme in which figured Weber’s Euryanthe overture, and the C minor symphony of Beethoven. The good doctor is a joy to read in these days when politeness has closed critical mouths. He first drags out the memory of Liszt and stamps on it—Liszt, who begged from literature his subjects for a symphony, and “making the alms pass as music.” Strauss goes to philosophy instead of to poetry. And then he slashes to the right and left of him. It is capital reading, if not convincing. The tone-poems of Richard Strauss are a musical refutation of Hanslick’s theories. There is no “content” in music, he declares; “the egg stands, anyhow,” retorts Columbus-Strauss!
The Strauss piano music is hardly inviting to any but the most devoted. Severe in outline, sombre in hue, it leans not to the sweet intimacies of Chopin or Schumann. Opus 5 is a solo sonata in B minor, some thirty pages long. I prefer Tschaïkowsky’s effort in the same form. If it is not as klaviermässig, it is more mellow. Stern, and in the mood Doric, the several movements of the Strauss sonata are sinewy rather than plastic, though the adagio in E has some moving moments. The scherzo is light and bright in execution. The composition will never become popular. In opus 3 there are some pieces of interest,—five in all,—and here Schumann’s influence is writ plain. Dense is the pattern, while the ideas are based on a poetic idea. Two numbers from opus 9, Stimmungsbilder, will please. They are a tender Träumerei and a delicate lyrical bit called An Einsamer Quelle. In the latter the harmonic changes recall Wagner. The most ambitious piano music is the burleske in D minor for piano and orchestra. This must have been written in 1885, though it bears no opus number. It is extremely difficult in the solo part, and not especially grateful. I can recall no one but Eugen d’Albert and Herr Backhaus as having played it—the latter at the London Strauss festival of 1903. Here Brahms is to the fore, the very opening bar of the piano being the theme of Brahms’s first D minor ballade. But how different the treatment! Bitter, rather airy, more sardonic than witty, this burleske demonstrates that the Teuton often unbends as sadly and stiffly as the Briton. Compare the piece with the incomparable jesting of Scarlatti’s burlesca, that joke which begins in G minor and ends in D minor! It is the eternal difference between the Italian and the German. Crabbed I call this burleske. The ’cello and piano sonata in F is a capital composition, and so is the sonata in E flat for viola and piano. His concerto for violin and orchestra in D minor has never received the attention it deserves; and I wish for the sake of novelty that the beautiful horn concerto, opus 11, would be given. For the waldhorn Strauss has a natural sympathy.
The lieder literature is important in quality. He has written nearly a hundred songs, some of them priceless in idea and workmanship. It is in this form that his friends and enemies have agreed upon his melodic invention. This refers to the various collections numbered opus 10, 15, 17, 19, 21, 26, 27, 29, 32, and 34; but I wonder whether the later collections in opus 39 and opus 41, 43, and 44 are received with the same enthusiasm. Some of them are harmonically difficult to grasp, and many are deceptive; when Strauss seems at his simplest, he is often most irritatingly complex and recondite. But an overflowing meed of praise must be awarded the opus 15, the lovely serenade in F sharp from opus 17, several from opus 21 and 27, and all of opus 29. A critic considers O wärst du mein, from opus 26, number 2, and Sehnsucht, opus 32, as the most beautiful of all. No mood seems denied Strauss. His exposition of the most exotic is indicative of a subtle, rather than a sensuous, musical nature. Yet how simply and naturally he has indicated a primitive emotion in Jungenhexenlied, opus 39, number 2. The song is a masterpiece. The sturdy power, the sheer muscularity, of The Workman from the same set, should make it beloved of manly male singers. Its great, resounding blows in F minor stir one’s very soul. And its sentiment is that of healthy anarchy, as befits the text of the poet Richard Dehmel. Death the Releaser, Leises Lied, and To my Son complete this opus. The last has a noble ring. The Silent Longing is the capture of an exquisitely evanescent mood. There are five numbers in opus 41,—a Cradle Song; In der Campagna; On the Shore,—full of introspective beauty, a dashing, vagabondish song; Brother Good-for-nothing; and Whisp’ring Songs. In all the music seeks the emotional curve, in all is there absolute fidelity to the poetic theme—that is, fidelity as the composer conceives it. Of mere sensuous or decorative music-making there is none. Strauss is ever beset by the idea; whether dramatic, metaphysical, or romantic-lyric, the idea takes precedence of the sound that clothes it. So there is little pretence of form, little thought of vocal exigencies, while the piano accompaniments are the most difficult ever written. If he hammers out epics in his orchestral compositions, in his lyrics he is the patient, curious master of miniature, the ivory worker of shapes exotic.
Guntram, for which Strauss wrote his own book, the first opera of this composer, is not familiar to Americans. It was never a great success, despite its earnestness and indisputable depth. Modelled on Wagnerian lines, it has for a subject the doings of The Fighters for Love, an order of knights, which, Parsifal-like, in the middle of the thirteenth century wars for the Cross and Brotherly Love; but with song and not with sword. Guntram, the hero, is a Fighter for Love, and his adventures and passion for Freihild form the basis of the book. The preludes to Acts I and II have been played in this country. The first is a lovely scheme of orchestration, Wagnerian in texture, and celebrates the yearning desire which the singers have consecrated to art and to the Cross. The second prelude is a brilliant, joyous picture of a Festival of Victory. The form and development are absolutely free. It is interesting to note, on the last page of the first prelude, an essential-turn that comes straight from Götterdämmerung. Strauss employs it with skill as a pregnant motive. While it is too short for concert performance, the prelude of the last act is the embodiment of yearning and rich in harmonic life. The great duo of Guntram and Freihild and Guntram’s farewell are noble specimens of dramatic writing. Nevertheless the work lacks big wings.
Two later compositions of Strauss, bearing the opus number 42, are for Männerchor,—Liebe and Altdeutsches Schlachtlied, both after Herder. Two sixteen-voiced mixed choruses a capella are also announced. Enoch Arden, opus 38, is a melodrama for piano and recitative. It is an interesting experiment, being melodious and effective. Written for von Possart the German tragedian, the weight of the work falls upon the reader.
At the seventy-seventh Netherrhenish Music Festival in Aix-la-Chapelle, June, 1900, Strauss produced two Grössere Gesänge, opus 44, for low voice and orchestra. Decidedly here the bust is in the orchestra, the pedestal—! The Rückert and Richard Dehmel are the poets levied upon—the first represented by his Nächtlichtergang, the other by a Notturno.
Strauss occasionally indulges in flashes of sly humor. Here is a footnote he appends to his song opus 31, number 2, Wenn:—