The biggest figure in modern German operatic music, as in instrumental music, is Richard Strauss. It was perhaps inevitable that this should be so. The more massive German opera after Wagner was almost bound to find what further development was possible to it in the Wagnerian semi-symphonic form; the difficulty was to find a composer capable of handling it. This form was simply the expression of a spirit that had come down to German music from Beethoven, and that had to work itself out to the full before the next great development—whatever that may prove to be—could be possible; it is the same spirit that is visible, in different but still related shapes, in the symphonic tissue of the Wagnerian orchestra, the symphonic poems of Liszt, the symphonies of Brahms, the pianoforte accompaniments of Wolf and Marx and their fellows, and the copious and vivid orchestral speech of Strauss. It is a method that is perhaps only thoroughly efficacious for composers whose heredity and environment make the further working out of the German tradition their most natural form of musical thinking. That it is not the form best suited to peoples to whom this tradition is not part of their blood and being is shown by the dramatic poignancy attained by such widely different dramatic methods as those of Moussorgsky, Puccini, and Debussy. But when a race has, in the course of generations, made for itself an instrument so magnificent in its power and scope, and one so peculiarly its own, as the German quasi-symphonic form, it is the most natural thing in the world that virtually all the best of its thinking should be done by its aid. It was therefore perhaps not an accident, but the logical outcome of the whole previous development of German music, that the mind that was to dominate the German opera of our own day should be the mind that had already proved itself to be the most fertile, original, and audacious in the field of instrumental music. But it was a law for Strauss, no less than for his smaller contemporaries, that if he was to be something more than a mere nach-Wagnerianer he must do his work outside not only the ground Wagner had occupied, but outside the ground still covered by his gigantic shadow.
It was well within that shadow, however, that Strauss's first dramatic attempt was made. It is not so much that the musical style of Guntram (1892-93) is now and then reminiscent of Tannhäuser, of Lohengrin or of Parsifal, while one of the themes has actually stepped straight out of the pages of Tristan. A composer can often indicate unmistakably his musical paternity and yet give us the clear impression that he has a genuine personality and style of his own. As a matter of fact, the general style of Guntram is unquestionably Strauss, and no one else. Where the Wagnerian influence is most evident is in the mental world in which the opera is set. The story, it is true—the text, by the way, is Strauss's own—is not drawn from the world of saga; but the general conception of an order of knights, the object of whose brotherhood is to bind all humanity in bonds of love, is obviously a last watering-down of that doctrine of redemption by love that played so large a part in the intellectual life of Wagner. It is possible that this peculiar mentality of Guntram was the aftermath of a breakdown in Strauss's health in 1892. The work has a high-mindedness, a spiritual fervor, an ethos that has never been particularly prominent in Strauss's work as a whole, and that has become more and more infrequent in it as he has grown older. Guntram is a convalescent's work, written in the mood of exalted idealism that convalescence so often brings with it in men of complex nature. But whatever be the physical or psychological explanation of the origin of Guntram, there is no doubt that the music lives in a finer, purer atmosphere than that of Strauss's work as a whole; and for this reason alone it will perhaps inspire respect even when its purely musical qualities may have become outmoded. The musical method of it contains in embryo all the later Strauss. The orchestral tissue has not, of course, the extraordinary exuberance of diction and of color of his subsequent operas, but the affiliation with Wagner is quite evident. There is a certain melodic angularity here and there, and a tendency to get harmonic point by mere audacious and self-conscious singularity—both defects being characteristic of a powerful and eager young brain possessed with ideals of expression that it is not yet capable of realizing. The general idiom is in the main that of Tod und Verklärung and Don Juan. It is worth noting that already in Strauss's first opera we perceive that failure to vivify all the characters equally that is so pronounced in the later works. It is one of the signs that, great as he is, he is not of the same great breed as Wagner.
By the time he came to write his second opera, Feuersnot (1900-01), Strauss had passed through all the main stages of his development as an orchestral composer; in Till Eulenspiegel, Also sprach Zarathustra, Don Quixote, and Ein Heldenleben he had come to thorough consciousness of himself, and attained an extraordinary facility of technique. Under these circumstances one would have expected Feuersnot to be a rather better work than it actually is. One's early enthusiasm for it becomes dissipated somewhat in the course of years—no doubt because as we look back upon it each of its faults has to bear not only its own burden, but the burden of all the faults of the same kind that have been piled up by Strauss in his later works. The passion of the love music, for instance, has more than a touch of commonplace in it now—as of a Teutonic Leoncavallo—our eyes having been opened by Elektra and 'The Legend of Joseph' to the pit of banality that always yawns at Strauss's elbow, and into which he finds it harder and harder to keep from slipping. We see Strauss experimenting here with the dance rhythms that he has so successfully exploited in Der Rosenkavalier; but to some of these also time has given a slightly vulgar air. But a great deal of the opera still retains its charm; some portions of it are a very happy distillation from the spirit of German popular music, and the music of the children will probably never lose its freshness. On the whole, the opera is the least significant of all Strauss's work of this class. It is clear that his long association with the concert room had made an instrumental rather than a vocal composer of him; much of the writing for the voice is awkward and inexpressive.
In the Symphonia Domestica (1903) were to be distinguished the first unmistakable signs of a certain falling off in Strauss's inspiration, a certain coarsening of the thought and a tendency to be too easily satisfied with the first idea that came into his head. These symptoms have become more and more evident in all the operas that have followed this last of the big instrumental works, though it has to be admitted that Strauss shows an extraordinary dexterity in covering up his weak places. Wagner's enemies, adapting an old gibe to him, used to say that his music consisted of some fine moments and some bad quarters of an hour. That was not true of Wagner, but it is becoming increasingly true of the later Strauss. For a while the quality of the really inspired moments was so superb as to more than compensate us for the disappointment of the moments that were obviously less inspired; but as time has gone on the inspired moments have become extremely rare and the others regrettably plentiful. We are probably not yet in a position to estimate justly the ultimate place of Strauss in the history of the opera. No composer has ever presented us with a problem precisely like his. The magnificent things in his work are of a kind that make us at first believe they will succeed in saving the weaker portions from the shipwreck that, on the merits of these alone, would seem to be their fate. Then, as each new work deepens the conviction that Strauss is the most sadly-flawed genius in the history of music, as he passes from banality to banality, each of them worse than any of its predecessors, we find ourselves, when we turn back to the earlier works, less disposed than before to look tolerantly on what is weakest in them. What will be the final outcome of it all—whether the halo round his head will ultimately blind us to the mud about his feet, or whether the mud will end by submerging the halo, no one can at present say. The Richard Strauss of to-day is an insoluble mystery.
Something excessive or unruly appears to be inseparable from everything he does. A consistent development is impossible for him; he oscillates violently like some sensitive electrical instrument in a storm. But, while only partisanship could blind anyone to the too palpable evidences of degeneration that his genius shows at many points, it is beyond question that in the best of his later stage works he dwarfs every other composer of his day. We may like or dislike the subject of Salome, according to our temperament; how far the question of ethics ought to be allowed to determine our attitude to an art work is a point on which it is perhaps hopeless to expect agreement. For the present writer the point is one of no importance, because the whole discussion seems to him to arise out of a confusion of the distinctive spheres of life and art. A Salome in life would be a dangerous and objectionable person, but then so would an Iago; and, as no one calls Shakespeare a monster of iniquity because he has drawn Iago with zest, one can see no particular justice in calling Strauss's mind a morbid one because it has been interested in the psychology of a pervert like Salome. One is driven to the conclusion that the root of the whole outcry is to be found in the prejudice many people have against too close an analysis of the psychology of sex, especially in its more perverted manifestations. One can respect that prejudice without sharing it; but one is bound to say it unfits the victim of it for appreciation of Salome as a work of art. The opera as a whole is not a masterpiece. It lives only in virtue of its great moments; and Strauss has not been more successful here than elsewhere in breathing life into every one of his characters. Herod and Herodias have no real musical physiognomy; we could not, that is to say, visualize them from their music alone as we can visualize a Hagen, a Mime, or even a David. But Salome is characterized with extraordinary subtlety. Music is here put to psychological uses undreamt of even by Wagner. The strange thing is that, in spite of himself, the artist in Strauss has risen above the subject. Wilde's Salome is a lifeless thing, a mere figure in some stiffly-woven tapestry. Strauss pours so full a flood of emotion over her that the music leaves us a final sensation, not of cold horror but of sadness and pity.
He similarly humanizes the central character of his next opera, Elektra (1907), making of her one of the great tragic figures of the stage; and he throws an antique dignity round the gloomy figure of the fate-bearing Orestes. But, as with Salome, the opera as a whole is not a great work. It contains a good deal of merely sham music, such as that of the opening scene—music in which Strauss simply talks volubly and noisily to hide the fact that he has nothing to say; and there is much commonplace music, such as that of the outburst of Chrysothemis to Elektra, and most of that of the final duet of the pair. One is left in the end with a feeling of blank amazement that the mind that could produce such great music as that of the opening invocation of Agamemnon by Elektra, that of the entry of Orestes, and that of the recognition of brother and sister, could be so lacking in self-criticism as to place side by side with these such banalities as are to be met with elsewhere in the opera. The only conclusion the close student of Strauss could come to after Elektra was that the commonplace that was not far from some of his finest conceptions from the first was now becoming fatally easy to him.
Der Rosenkavalier (1913) confirmed this impression. Its waltzes have earned for it a world-wide popularity. They are charming enough, but there are no doubt a hundred men in Europe who could have written these. What no other living composer could have written is the music—so wise, so human—of the scene between Octavian and the Marschallin at the end of the first act, the music of the entry of the Rosenkavalier in the second act, and the great trio in the third, that can look the Meistersinger quintet in the face and not be ashamed. But again and again in the Rosenkavalier we meet with music that is the merest mechanical product of an energetic brain working without inspiration—the bulk of the music of the third act, for instance, as far as the trio. And once more Strauss shows, by his quite indefinite portraiture of Faninal and Sophia, that his powers of musical characterization are limited to the leading personages of his works. Since Der Rosenkavalier the general quality of his thinking has obviously deteriorated. There are very few pages of Ariadne auf Naxos that are above the level of the ordinary German kapellmeister, while that of the mimodrama, 'The Legend of Joseph,' is the most pretentiously commonplace that Strauss has ever produced. If his career were to end now, the best epitaph we could find for him would be Bülow's remark à propos of Mendelssohn: 'He began as a genius and ended as a talent.' Strauss's ten years in the theatre have undoubtedly done him much harm; they have especially made him careless as to the quality of much of his music, knowing as he does that the excitement of the action and the general illusion of the theatre may be trusted to keep the spectator occupied. But one may perhaps venture to predict that unless he returns to the concert room for a while, and forgets there a great deal of what he has learned in the theatre, he will not easily recover the position he has latterly lost.
Less well-known names in contemporary German opera, some of which, however, are too important to be omitted, are Ignaz Brüll (1846-1907), a Viennese whose dialogue opera Das goldene Kreuz (1875) is still in the German répertoire;[40] Edmund Kretschmer (b. 1830) with Die Folkunger (1874), on a Scandinavian subject treated in the earlier Wagnerian style, and Heinrich der Löwe (1877); and Franz von Holstein (b. 1826) with Die Heideschacht, etc. Karl Reinthaler (1822-96) and Karl Grammann (1842-97) also wrote operas successful in their time, as did also Hiller, Wüerst, Reinecke, Dietrich, Abert, Rheinberger, and H. Hofmann, who are mentioned elsewhere. Siegfried Wagner (b. 1869), son of the great master and a pupil of Humperdinck, should not be overlooked. His talent is unpretentious, with a decided bent for 'folkish' melody, and an excellent technical equipment. In Der Bärenhäuter (1899) he follows the fashion for fairy-opera; his four other operas (from Der Kobold to Sternengebot, 1904) lean toward the popular Spieloper, with a tinge of romanticism.
Klose's 'dramatic symphony' Ilsebill (1903) really belongs to the genus fairy-opera. While Karl von Kaskel's (b. 1860) two charming works, Die Bettlerin vom Pont des Arts and Dusle und Babell, are to be classified as Spielopern.