How easy it all is, to be sure, and how stupidly devoid of imagination we must all be who fail to read it clearly in the music! If we fail to find it, it is our fault. Lichtenberg, a witty German, said, "If a monkey look into a mirror, no Apostle will look out."
We may save ourselves much time and intellectual labor if we listen carefully to "Also sprach Zarathustra." Dr. Draper packed a history of the intellectual development of Europe into two substantial volumes which a thoughtful man may read in a winter; yet he may hear not only the intellectual, but also the religious development of the entire human race in Mr. Strauss's tone poem in about thirty minutes. A benefactor of mankind indeed is this philanthropist, who has not sought to write philosophical music. He has invented for us a kind of sugar-coated knowledge tablet. Abolish dry books and listen to the tone poems of Richard Strauss, and you will have the wisdom of the ages poured into your ears by trumpets and trombones.
And yet how refreshing to the spirit it is to hear after a Strauss tone preachment some such work of pure feeling as Schumann's Spring symphony! Here is no fugued fuddle of the fulminations of science. Here is no heart-wrung cry of a philosopher from the mountain top, come down to set whole the disjointed times and wailing because the populace thinks him a goatherd. Here is no dissector of sated souls, no juggler with death rattles, no miser of a hope-drained race.
Here is one who served and suffered for the sake of love's infinite joy, who has trod the valley of the shadow and come to the sunlit plateau of his heart's desire, and who, as he lifts his brow to the radiance of the new day, strikes his lyre and bursts into a pæan of rapture. His music glows and throbs with feeling, for it is feeling grown too great for the inflection of common speech and so hymned to us by the myriad-voiced orchestra in one beautiful anthem of the budding of eternal spring in the heart of a man. That is programme music which needs no explanatory notes.
"Backward, turn backward, O Time, in thy flight!
Make me a child again just for to-night."
How often shall we who are treading the downward slopes of life croon that old couplet and yearn for the cradle songs of Schubert and Beethoven? How often, too, we wonder, will a weary world turn back with weary brain from the sordid task of transfretating "the Sequane at the dilucul and crepuscul" with Strauss and his tribe to the poets of the dawn who smote the great primeval chords of human feeling? This we may not now answer, for orchestral music is yet in her infancy and it is possible that the period of to-day is but the disturbance of a transition.
IV.—STRAUSS AND THE SONG WRITERS
He hath songs, for man or woman, of all sizes.