OVERTONES

Books by James Huneker

Overtones: A Book of Temperaments. With Frontispiece. $1.25, net.

Melomaniacs. 12mo. $1.50.

Chopin: The Man and His Music. With Portrait. $2.00.

Mezzotints in Modern Music. 12mo. $1.50.

Richard Strauss. (signature)

OVERTONES
A BOOK OF TEMPERAMENTS

RICHARD STRAUSS, PARSIFAL, VERDI, BALZAC,
FLAUBERT, NIETZSCHE, AND TURGÉNIEFF
BY
JAMES HUNEKER
Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself.
Walt Whitman
WITH PORTRAIT
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1904

COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

Published March, 1904.

TO
RICHARD STRAUSS
A MUSIC-MAKER OF INDIVIDUAL STYLE
A SUPREME MASTER OF THE ORCHESTRA
AN ANARCH OF ART
THIS SHEAF OF STUDIES
IS ADMIRINGLY INSCRIBED

CONTENTS

I
RICHARD STRAUSS

We cannot understand what we do not love.

—Elisée Reclus.

I

It is easier to trace the artistic lineage of Richard Strauss to its fountain-head—Johann Sebastian Bach—than to stamp with a contemporary stencil its curious ramifications. And this is not alone because of a similar polyphonic complexity, a complex of themes and their development without parallel since the days of the pattern-weaving Flemish contrapuntists; but because, like Bach Strauss has experimented in the disassociation of harmonies, and, in company with his contemporary, the master-impressionist, Claude Monet, has divided his tones—set up, instead of the sober classic lines or the gorgeous color masses of the romantic painters, an entirely new scheme of orchestration, the basic principle of which is individualism of instruments, the pure anarchy—self-government—of the entire orchestral apparatus. This is but a mode of technique and does not necessarily impinge upon the matter of his musical discourse; it is a distinctive note, however, of the Strauss originality, and must be sounded in any adequate discussion of his very modern art.

Borrowing the word with its original connotations from the erudite and clairvoyant French critic, Rémy de Gourmont, disassociation in the practice of Strauss is a species of tone chemistry by which a stereotyped musical phrase is reduced to its virginal element, deprived of factitious secondary meaning, and then re-created, as if in the white heat of a retort, by the overpowering and disdainful will of the composer. We have also the disassociation of ideas from their antique succession, that chiefly reveals itself, not in a feverish, disordered syntax, but in the avoidance of the classic musical paragraph—that symmetrical paragraph as inexorably formulated as the laws of the Medes and Persians, resulting in a Chinese uniformity maddening in its dulness and lifelessness unless manipulated by a man of intellectual power. Strauss is forever breaking up his musical sentences. He does this in no arbitrary fashion, but as the curve of the poem is ideally pictured to his imagination. A great realist in his tonal quality, he is first the thinker, the poet, the man of multitudinous ideas; you hear the crack of the master’s whip, a cruel one at times, as he marshals his themes into service, bidding them build, as built the Pharaohs’ slaves, obelisks and pyramids, shapes of grandeur that pierce the sky and blot out from the vision all but their overwhelming and monumental beauties of form—the form of Richard Strauss. He is, after his own manner, as severe a formalist as Josef Haydn.

We are now far away from what is called euphony for euphony’s sake; though it is, as in Bach’s case, art for art with all the misused phrase implies. Intent upon realizing in tone his vision,—the magnitude or validity of which we need not yet discuss,—Strauss allows no antique rubric of fugue or symphony to block his progress; even the symphonic poem, an invention of Franz Liszt, proves too cumbersome for this new man of light and air and earth, whose imagination is at once sumptuous and barbaric. The picture must overflow the old frames. It must burn with an intense life. It must be true. As a man who crept before he walked, walked before he ran, Richard Strauss has the right to our sympathy. He was a wonder-child; he is one of the world’s great conductors; he wrote symphonies in the Brahms style during his studious youth; he composed a little literature of chamber music, piano pieces, a violin concerto, and many songs prior to the time when he faced the sun of Wagner and was undazzled by its rays. He knew the scores of Wagner, Liszt, and Berlioz, has imitated, and has forgotten them in the swirling torrential tides of his own strange temperament.

Once music was pure rhythm; once it was howling and gesture. It moved up the evolutionary scale slowly and reached the kingdom of the instrumental arabesque with difficulty; on this side was the ecclesiastical liturgy with its rigorous inclusions and suppressions; on the other, the naïve young art of opera. Let us acknowledge that Bach was the crowning glory of the art polyphonic, that Palestrina closed the door behind him on churchly chants, that Beethoven said the last significant word in the symphony; let us admit these trite propositions, and we have still perplexing problems to solve. The song-writers, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, shall not detain us—they represent but an exquisite province of music. The neo-symphonists, beginning with Schubert and Schumann and ending with Brahms, are not to be weighed here. They said much that was novel, but they adhered to the classic line; they did not draw in the mass, to use the painter’s term. It is to Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner that the new movement should be credited: Liszt, for his prophetic power—he remodelled the symphonic form, but like Moses, he was destined to see, not to enter, the promised land; Berlioz, for adding to the instrumental palette new hues, bewildering nuances and bizarre splendor; Wagner, for banishing convention from the operatic stage, furnishing the myth as the ideal libretto, for his bold annexation of the symphonic orchestra and the extraordinary uses to which he put it. Yet only one of the three men has held out the torch to future composers—Franz Liszt. Berlioz’s talent was largely that of a perverse fresco painter; Wagner quite closed his epoch—one of rampant romanticism—in his music-drama, and by his powerful genius almost swerved music from its normal, absolute currents.

He quite flooded the musical firmament with his radiations. There was but one god and he reigned at Bayreuth; go hence and worship, or else be cast with the unbelieving into outer darkness where there is gnashing of teeth! The music-drama was the synthesis of the arts. It was the panacea of all social evils, and Parsifal we beheld as another Paraclete! Such arrogation of omnipotence was bound to encounter reverses. The Wagnerian mixture of words and music, of drama ranking before music and music playing the handmaid rôle of commentator, has stood the tests neither of its creator nor of time. We know our Wagner now; not as a philosopher—shades of Schopenhauer!—not as a poet—let us not invoke the spirit of Goethe!—not as a reformer, dramatist, revolutionist, but as a composer of genius, with a lot of wrong-headed theories, whose magnificent music floated his doctrines and blinded the younger generation to their speciousness. It is music, not drama, that rules in Wagner’s works.

The evil done was this: Music could no longer speak in her own divine voice without the aid of words, without the hobbling drawbacks of singers, stage pictures, plots, all the thrice-familiar mise en scène of the Wagnerian music-drama. Nevertheless, Wagner did enhance the value of the suggestion in music. He invented his own stenographic method of speech and with it literally created a new musical consciousness. A motive means something, is the symbol of an idea, or state of soul; yet we know that if this motive has to be accompanied by dramatic gesture or clothed verbally, then all the worse for it as pure music; it gains visually, but loses on the imaginative side. Before Wagner, Liszt discovered the power of the concise phrase and even labelled it; and before Liszt, came Beethoven in his C minor symphony; while antedating all was Bach, whose music is a perfect storehouse of motivation.

II

And again we reach Richard Strauss by way of Bach; in the music of the modern composer the motive achieves its grand climacteric. His scheme is the broad narrative form, a narration that for sustained puissance and intensity has never been equalled. The new melody is no longer a pattern of instrumentation, nor is it an imitation of the human voice; it is extra-human, on the thither side of speech. It is neither a pure ravishment of the ear, nor yet an abstruse geometrical problem worked out according to the law of some musical Euclid.

Now, music of the highest order must make its first appeal to the imagination; its first impact must be upon the cortical centres. It must not alone set the feet rhythmically pattering, it must not merely stir us to emotional thrilling. Not in the sensuous abandon of dance rhythms, but by thought,—that is, by musical thought, in a chain of tonal imagery, is the aim of the new music. Walter Pater believed, Plato-wise, that music is the archetype of the arts. It was an amiable heresy. But music must stand solitary—it is often too theatric, as poetry is often too tonal. It must be intellect suffused by emotion. Its substance is not the substance of its sister arts. What music has long needed, what Wagner and the church writers before him sought to give it, is definiteness. The welding of word and tone does not produce true musical articulateness. We recognize this in Tristan and Isolde, where incandescent tone quite submerges the word, the symbol of the idea. Erotic music has never before so triumphed as in this Celtic drama. And it is like the fall of some great blazing visitor from interstellar space; it buries itself beneath the smoking earth instead of remaining royally afloat in the pure ether of the idea.

The arts cannot be thus fused. When faith moved nations, the world witnessed the marriage of word and tone in the ritual of the church; no music has been so definite since Palestrina’s as Wagner’s—until the music of Richard Strauss was heard. In it we encounter a definiteness that is almost plastic, though never baldly literal. As we noted in our rapid survey, the ethic quality of Beethoven, the philosophic quality of Brahms, the dramatic quality of Wagner, are all aside from the purpose of Strauss. He seeks to express in tone alone. The new melody is but an old name for—characterization. And now we reach at last the core of Strauss, who is a psychological realist in symphonic art, withal a master symbolist; back of his surface eccentricities there is a foundational energy, an epic largeness of utterance, a versatility of manner, that rank him as the unique anarchist of music. He taps the tocsin of revolt, and his velvet sonorities do not disguise either their meagre skein of spirituality or the veiled ferocities of his aristocratic insurgency.

The present writer put this question to Herr Strauss in London in the summer of 1903: Has he always subjected himself to the tyranny of an ideal programme before composing? The notion seemed elementary to him. “All good music has a poetic idea for a basis,” he replied; and he instanced the Beethoven piano sonatas, the Bach fugues. But he admitted that his brain caught fire at poetic figures, such as Don Juan, Don Quixote, Macbeth; Also sprach Zarathustra, Till Eulenspiegel, Ein Heldenleben. Even a landscape or a seascape could provoke from him the charming suite of images we find in his Italia. With the poem of Death and Apotheosis, affixed to the score after the music had been composed, we may see that Strauss is not a man pinioned to a formula. But the effect on his hearers of his message, on those hearers who have submitted to his magic, is articulate as has been no anterior music. He moulds his meanings into a thousand forms—for what is form in the academic sense to this arch-disintegrator? And these forms resolve themselves into as many more shapes—shapes of beauty, terror, tragedy, comedy, morose mysticism, ugly platitude; into grimacing runes, shuddering madness, lyric exaltation, and enigmatic gropings; yet never the banal rhetoric of the orchestra, the rhetoric that has seduced so many composers to write for the sake of the sound, for the joy of the style. Strauss always means something. All is in the narration of his story, a story suggested with as much art as the inspiring poem; a misty cloud, perhaps, to the unsympathetic, a pillar of flame to the initiated. It is a new speech; notes, phrases, groups, movements, masses of tone, no longer occupy conventional, relative positions in his tone-poems. The violent disassociation of the old phraseology—his scores seem to be heard vertically as well as horizontally—smug harmonization, melodies that fall gratefully into the languid channels of our memory—in a word, the mechanical disposition of stale material is transformed, undergoes permutation to make way for a new syntax, a nervous, intense method of expression, strange elliptical flights, erratic foreshortenings, with classic and romantic canons cast to the winds; yet imposing a new grouping, a new harmonic scale of values, a new order of melody—the melody of characterization, the melody that pilots the imagination across uncharted territory into a land overflowing with feeling, intellect, tenderness, and sublimity, with irony, ugliness, humor, and humanity; a land not lacking in milk and honey, the land of Richard Strauss! A delectable region is discovered by this young man when we believed that the grim old wizard, Wagner, had locked us up forever in his torrid zone, where, like a Klingsor, he evoked for our parched souls the shadows of bayaderes and monstrous flowers and monstrous passions! Lo, another Richard has guided us to a newer domain, which, if not so fascinatingly tropical, is one where hallucinating chromaticism does not rule, where a more intellectual diatonic mode prevails. Strauss is master of a cold, astringent voluptuousness. His head rules his heart. Above all, he searches for character, for its every trait. He himself may be a Merlin,—all great composers are ogres in their insatiable love of power,—but he has rescued us from the romantic theatric blight; and a change of dynasty is always welcome to slaves of the music habit.

His music did not exhibit its first big curve of originality until the publication of Don Juan, opus 20. His intimate charming songs are the epitome of his peculiar dramatic faculty for clothing in tone, or rather emptying into music, the meaning of the poet. Avoiding the more recondite question of form, it may be said that as in the songs, so is it in his symphonic works. With no other indication than a title (he cannot be blamed for the extravagances of the analytical-programme makers), Strauss pours upon our puzzled and enchanted ears a billow of music terrifying at times: it is a veritable tidal wave; you see it cresting the rim of the horizon and rolling toward you sky high. His Don Juan and Macbeth are romantic in style, and for that reason are praised by those who fear to desert old milestones and wander in the tangled, fulminating forests of his later music. With the story of the mediæval German rogue, Till Eulenspiegel, Strauss unleashes his fantasy. It is a scherzo in form—how he burlesques the form and its very idea! The color scheme is daring, oppressively high, and at times we near the cosmic screech. All is prankishness, darting fancy, consuming irony. The humor is both rarefied and Teutonically clumsy. Till lives, Till is scampish, Till is gibbeted. Tone itself is volatilized into fiery particles that seem to fall upon the listener from dizzily pitched passages. Such a picture has never been hung in the august halls of music. It offends. It blazes in the eyes with its brilliant audacity, and yet it is new music, music gashed and quivering with rhythmic life. Rhythmically, Strauss is an adventurer into an absolutely novel clime. He touches hands with the far East in his weaving interior rhythms.

Death and Apotheosis is a tone-poem, rather Lisztian in its pompous and processional picture at the close. Its very title calls up the Weimar master’s Tasso. But it differs inasmuch as it is better realized externally, while its psychology, morbid in several episodes, is more masterful. It is not a Tasso, not a poet enthroned in deathless immortality, but a soul, the soul, which, lying in its “necessitous little chamber” of death, reviews its past, its youth, hope, love, conflict, defeat, despair, and at the end its feverish ecstasy, its sorrowful dissolution. Strauss with a secret tiny brush has surprised the human heart in travail. It is pathos breeding. The added touches of realism, the gasping for breath, and the lenten tic-toc of the heart, should not disquiet us. Æsthetic propriety is never violated. And Tod und Verklärung is hardly the greatest that is in Richard Strauss.

The much-discussed Thus spake Zarathustra is not, as has been humorously asserted, an attempt to make music a camel that will bear the burdens of philosophy; it is the outcome of profound study in the vaticinating leaves of Nietzsche’s bible. Its dancing lyricism is reflected in the Strauss score, which opens with a pantheistic evocation of sunrise, uplifting in its elemental grandeur. Seldom has music displayed a result brought about with such comparative simplicity—a simplicity in inverse proportion to its subtlety. It invites to the prayer of the sun worshippers as they salute their round burning god lifting in the blue. The composition is welded by a giant will. It contains so many incongruous elements, that their complete amalgamation seems at first hearing an incredible attempt. It is the old symphonic-poem form of Liszt, but altered, amplified. The themes appear, disappear, surge to insanity in their passion, melt into religious appeal, dance with bacchanalian joy, mock, blaspheme, exhort, and enchant. There is ugly music and hieratic, music bitter and sweet, black music and white, music that repels and music that lures—we are hopelessly snared by the dream tunes of this enharmonic fowler, who often pipes in No Man’s Land on the other side of good and evil. The ear is ravished, the eye dazzled; every brain centre is assaulted, yet responds to a new and formidable engine for stimulating ideas and emotions. The Old-World riddle is propounded and left unsolved. And we seem to have grazed an Apocalypse of scepticism in the conflicting tonalities with their sphinx-like profiles.

III

The greatest technical master of the orchestra, making of it a vibrating dynamic machine, a humming mountain of fire, Richard Strauss, by virtue of his musical imagination, is painter-poet and psychologist. He describes, comments, and narrates in tones of jewelled brilliancy; his orchestra flashes like a canvas of Monet—the divided tones and the theory of complementary colors (overtones) have their analogues in the manner with which Strauss intricately divides his various instrumental choirs: setting one group in opposition or juxtaposition to another; producing the most marvellous, unexpected effects by acoustical mirroring and transmutation of motives; and almost blinding the brain when the entire battery of reverberation and repercussion is invoked. If he can paint sunshine and imitate the bleating of sheep, he can also draw the full-length portrait of a man. This he proves with his Don Quixote, wherein the nobler dreamer and his earthy squire are heard in a series of adventures, terminating with the death of the rueful knight—one of the most poignant pages in musical literature. Don Quixote is shown as the quotidian type of man whose day-dreams are a bridge leading to the drab and sorrowful cell of madness. He is not mocked, but tenderly treated, by Strauss. It is upon the broad-backed Sancho Panza that the composer unlooses his quiver of humorous arrows. The score is thus far—to my taste—the greatest of its maker, the noblest in subject-matter, in dignity of theme, complexity of handling, and synthetic power. To show his independence of all musical form, Strauss selected the most worn—the theme with variations. Amazing is the outcome. No other composer before him, not even the master variationist, Brahms, has so juggled and deployed the entire range of musical material in serried battalions. Virtuosity there is, but it is the virtuosity that serves a psychologist; never is there display for decoration’s idle use. All is realistic fancy. A solo violoncello and a solo viola represent the half-cracked pair of Cervantes. The madness of Quixote is indicated by a device musically and psychologically unique. His theme, his character, goes to pieces in mid-air, after the mania of romance reading. The muting of the instruments and general muddling of ideas make the picture of slow-creeping derangement painfully true. Then follow variations, close in their fidelity to the story, and never unmindful of the medium in which it is told. Despite the disquieting verisimilitude of the wind-machine, of the sheep, Strauss has never put forth his astoundingly imaginative powers to such purpose. We are stunned, horrified, piqued, yet always enthralled by this masterful ironist who has conserved his mental sincerity. The finale is soothing, its facture is a miracle of tonal values. Don Quixote, until he surpasses it, will remain a monument to Richard Strauss.

The Hero’s Life is nearer the symphony in a formal sense than any of his newer works. It is his most robust composition. The conception is breath-catching, for it is a chant of the Ego, the tableau of Strauss’s soul exposed as objectively as Walt Whitman’s when he sang of his Me. The general outline of the work is colossal; it has no wavering contours, and is virile with a virility that shocks. It flouts the critics of the composer and shows a stupendous battle-piece, Tolstoyian in fury, duration, and breadth. Cacophony rules; yet is not a battle always cacophonous? The old-fashioned symbols of trumpet-blasts with ornamental passage-work are here rudely disclaimed; war is cruel, and this episode is repulsive in its aural cruelty. The ancient harmonic order will be indeed changed when such a tonal conflict is accepted by the rear-guard. Often we cannot hear the music because of the score. For the rest, there are apposite quotations from the composer’s earlier works, and the coda is beautiful with its supreme peace, supreme absorption in Nirvana.

This, then, has Richard Strauss accomplished: He has restored to instrumental music its rightful sovereignty; it need fear no longer the encroachment of music-drama, at best a bastard art. Enlarged, its eloquence enormously intensified, its capacity for rare, subtle beauty increased tenfold, the modern orchestra has been literally enfranchised by Strauss from the house of operatic bondage. He has revolutionized symphonic music by breaking down its formal barriers, and he has filled his tone-poems with a new and diverse content. In less than an hour he concentrates, relates, makes us see, feel, and hear more than could be seen, heard, or felt in a music-drama enduring six. His musical themes, quâ themes, are not to be matched with Beethoven’s, his melodic invention deviates from the classic prettiness; yet because of his incomparable architectonics, of his majestic grip on the emotional, he keeps us hypnotized as his stately, fantastic tonal structures slowly uprise and unfold like many-colored smoke from the incantations of legendary Eastern genii. He absorbs absolutely our consciousness with a new quintessence of poetic, pictorial, sculptural, and metaphysical art. Music, unaided by words or theatric device,—for the compositions of Strauss may be enjoyed without their titles,—has never been so articulate, so dangerously definite, so insidiously cerebral. Madness may lie that way; but the flaming magic of the man is ever restrained by deep artistic reverence. We catch glimpses of vast vistas where dissonance is king; slow, iron twilights in which trail the enigmatic figures of another world; there are often more moons than one in the blood-red skies of his icy landscapes; yet the sacred boundaries of music are never overstepped. Little matters the niche awarded this composer by posterity—Richard Strauss is the musical enchanter of our day.

IV

Richard Strauss was born at Munich, June 11, 1864. He is the son of Franz S. Strauss, formerly first horn player in the Bavarian Court Band. His father has written studies and other compositions for his instrument; and, as his son said, “he could play most of the instruments in the orchestra.” He sat under Wagner’s stick, but was not a Wagnerian. Once he played so well that Wagner exclaimed, “I fancy after all, Strauss, you cannot be such an anti-Wagnerian as they make out, for you play my music so beautifully.” “What has that got to do with it?” answered the stubborn artist. The mother of Richard was born Pschorr, and is a daughter of the wealthy Munich brewer. The boy received his first piano lessons at the age of four and a half from his mother. Later he studied with August Tombo, a harp player, and took up the violin under Benno Walter. At the age of six he composed a three-part song, a valse, and a polka—Schneider Polka, he called the dance. Before he went to school he had tried his hand at songs, piano pieces, and an orchestral overture. Sent to the elementary schools from 1870 to 1874, the gymnasium from 1874 to 1882, and the university from 1882 to 1884, Strauss laid the foundation of a comprehensive culture, a catholicity in taste, a love of belles lettres, and a general knowledge of the world’s literature. He early mastered the technics of the piano and violin, and in 1875, with Kapellmeister Fr. W. Meyer, theory and composition. This course lasted five years. The composing went on apace. A chorus for the Electra of Sophocles and a festival chorus were given a hearing at a gymnasium concert. Three of his songs were sung in 1880; and in March, 1881, his string quartet in A, opus 2, the scherzo of which he wrote in his fifteenth year, was played by Benno Walter’s quartet, to whom it was dedicated. Four days later his first symphony was accorded a hearing under Hermann Levi, and the extreme youth of the composer called forth remonstrances. In 1883 Berlin heard his C minor overture under Radecke. Both are still in manuscript.

Of this formative period Strauss has told us that, “My father kept me very strictly to the old masters, in whose compositions I had a thorough grounding. You cannot appreciate Wagner and the moderns unless you pass through this grounding in the classics. Young composers bring me voluminous manuscripts for my opinion on their productions. In looking at them I find that they generally want to begin where Wagner left off. I say to all such, ‘My good young man, go home and study the works of Bach, the symphonies of Haydn, of Mozart, of Beethoven, and when you have mastered these art works come to me again.’ Without thoroughly understanding the significance of the development from Haydn, via Mozart and Beethoven, to Wagner, these youngsters cannot appreciate at their proper worth either the music of Wagner or of his predecessors. ‘What an extraordinary thing for Richard Strauss to say,’ these young men remark, but I only give them the advice gained by my own experience.”

Then came a stroke of luck. Von Bülow’s attention being attracted by the charmingly written and scored serenade (opus 7) in E flat for thirteen wind instruments, secured it for the repertory of the Meiningen orchestra. It is scored for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, four horns, two bassoons, and contrabassoon (or bass tuba). His second symphony in F minor was composed during the season of 1883-1884. It was first played in New York under Theodore Thomas, December 15, 1884, and later by Walter Damrosch. It shows many traces of the young composer’s close study of Brahms. The horn concerto, opus 11, and the piano quartet, opus 13, were composed at the same period. The latter won a prize. It shows a straining for bigger effects, as if the form were too cramped for the strenuous composer. The andante and scherzo are the more agreeable movements. The Wanderer’s Sturmlied, after Goethe’s poem, beginning, “Wen du nicht Verlässest, Genius,” revealed the taste for literary themes and themes that exalt the individuality. This opus 14 is written for six-voiced chorus, two soprani, one alto, one tenor, two bassi, and orchestra. It also shows the serious influence of the Brahms Schicksalslied. A second suite for wind was first given at Munich, conducted by the composer.

“Bülow, who was very fond of my father,” says Strauss, “interested himself in me, and I have much to thank him for. He started me on my conducting career. My first experience of standing before an orchestra was in connection with the performance of a suite, in four movements, for wind instruments, which I had composed at his request. It is still in manuscript. Bülow made me conduct it without any rehearsal!” This must be the grand suite in B flat, misleadingly numbered opus 14—the same opus number as the Sturmlied. It is scored for thirteen wind instruments, and has been heard in London. The introduction and entire fourth movement are said to be the best. It is early Strauss. Strauss became music director in Meiningen, October, 1885, conducted his own F minor symphony and also made his début as pianist in Mozart’s C minor concerto. Von Bülow honored him by conducting the concerto.

Strauss had already come under the influence of Alexander Ritter (1833-1896), a violinist in the Munich Orchestra who had married a niece of Wagner’s. Ritter, like von Bülow, was a man of strong magnetic personality, and both were warm-blooded Wagnerians and Lisztians. As boys they listened to that wonderful performance of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony given by Wagner at Dresden in 1849, and the two young gentlemen schoolfellows used to doff their caps every time they passed the master’s windows in the Ostra-Allee. “Ritter was exceptionally well read in all the philosophers, ancient and modern, and a man of the highest culture. His influence,” says Strauss, “was in the nature of a storm-wind. He urged me on to the development of the poetic, the expressive, in music, as exemplified in the works of Liszt, Wagner, and Berlioz. My symphonic fantasia, Aus Italien, is the connecting link with the old and the new methods.” The young composer went to Rome and Naples in the spring of 1886. Strauss tells an amusing incident. “A few days ago I was conducting this symphony at Brunswick, when a policeman appeared on the scene and stopped the performance because, as he said, some condition had not been complied with. Soon after, however, another policeman came and said the concert might proceed. This unwarrantable interruption caused great uproar, and the audience shouted anathemas against the police. At the close of the symphony I turned to the audience and said, ‘You see, ladies and gentlemen, in this Italy there are no anarchists!’”

In 1886 he left Meiningen to become third Kapellmeister under Levi and Fischer. He wrote his tone-poem Macbeth at this period, though it bears a later opus number than Don Juan. The former, after a revision and partial rewriting, was dedicated to Alexander Ritter, and first performed under von Bülow in Berlin. Strauss remained at Munich until 1890, when he received a call from Weimar. In the ducal city he shed his pupil’s skin and developed into a brilliant conductor. His radical tendencies were now beginning to be recognized, and his espousal of the music of the extreme Left caused his conducting of Wagner and Liszt to become notable. At Leipsic his influence was felt as conductor at the Liszt society. He has always warmly defended the music of Wagner, Liszt, and Berlioz.

In 1892 his lungs were affected and a protracted journey to Greece, Egypt, and Sicily was necessary. He was not idle, however, for on his return his grand opera, Guntram, opus 25, and dedicated to his parents, was produced at Weimar. He married in 1894 Pauline de Ahna, the daughter of a well-known Bavarian general, and the soprano who created the Freihild in Guntram.

From Weimar Strauss returned to Munich as Court Kapellmeister, and three years later he succeeded Levi as general music director. Not satisfied with matters, he left Munich to become Kapellmeister at the Berlin Royal Opera, which position he still occupies. He had conducted the Philharmonic Orchestra of Berlin after the death of von Bülow, but the trip from Munich to Berlin was too exhausting, and Arthur Nikisch was permanently engaged. Strauss has conducted at Bayreuth, festivals at Liège, Cologne, Leipsic, Milan, Moscow. In 1897 he visited London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Barcelona, and a year later Zurich and Madrid. In 1903 he conducted, in conjunction with Wilhelm Mengelberg, a series of concerts in London, a Strauss festival organized by Hugo Goerlitz. The Amsterdam Symphony Orchestra, a remarkable aggregation of artists, played. His Parisian experiences were most gratifying; he appeared in the dual rôles of conductor-composer, his wife singing his lieder with exquisite taste.

As a conductor he ranks among the great ones. He is particularly sympathetic in his readings of modern works, though any one who has heard him direct a Mozart opera can never forget the impressions gleaned—the blitheness, sanity, sweetness. He is cool, never eccentric in his beat, and does not play upon his own personality, as do some other conductors.

A little critical and polemical literature has grown up about the Strauss case. In addition to the analytical programmes, some of them too fantastic to be of value, Hans Merian has written an extended study of Also sprach Zarathustra; Gustav Brecher, Richard Strauss; Dr. Erich Urban, Strauss contra Wagner—in which Wagner is proved to be old-fashioned; Urban has also put forth a pamphlet-essay, Richard Strauss. In his youth, writes Urban, Wagner cried exultantly, “I am a musician;” in his age he mumbled, “I am a poet.” And he really believed he had discovered in the Greek an excuse for his mutilation of drama and music. Then Urban turns to Liszt. Liszt, he said, went far, but not far enough. He grew timid when he saw the logical outcome of his experiments. He still clung to the classic, to the formal. Strauss appears. Urban thinks he showed absolutely no individual talent until his opus 14, Wanderer’s Sturmlied. His early work is Schumann, and Schumann at his worst. The learned critic does not believe that either von Bülow or Ritter counted in the formation of Strauss. He looks upon Guntram as an accident, and Heldenleben as an answer to Zarathustra. He does not believe the latter to have been inspired by Nietzsche,—Strauss composed it when he discovered that Nietzsche’s philosophy coincided with his own revolutionary programme. And as the same ideas are expressed in Heldenleben, the titles could be exchanged without any harm. Truly a Daniel come to judgment! It is in Heldenleben that Urban sees Strauss at the top notch of his ideals. Here is musical drama without the words, scenery, stage, or singers.

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:—

Should any singers think of singing this song, while the nineteenth century is still in existence, the composer would advise them to transpose it from this point, a half-tone lower (i.e. into E flat), so that the composition may thus end in the key in which it began.

Fuersnot, a Singgedicht in one act, book by Ernst von Wolzogen, music by Richard Strauss, was produced at the Royal Opera House, Dresden, November 21, 1901. The libretto is founded on a Netherland story, entitled, The Fire Famine at Oudenaerde. Emil Paur introduced several excerpts, sonorous, brilliant music, at a Philharmonic concert.

When questioned about his future plans Strauss replied: “I have made a musical setting to Uhland’s Taillefer for chorus, soli, and full orchestra. I am surprised that musicians have not availed themselves of this fresh, magnificent poem before—at least I have heard of no setting. Altogether one admires Uhland too little these days. When I was younger I neglected reading him very much; but now I find one beauty after another in his writing. I also have material for two symphonic poems, but don’t know which one I shall use—if indeed I finish any—now. It usually takes two years before a composition begins to assume form with me. At first there comes to me an idea—a theme. This rests with me for months; I think of other things and busy myself with everything but it; but the idea is fermenting of its own accord. Sometimes I bring it to mind, or play the theme on the piano, just to see how far it has progressed—and finally it is ready for use. You see, therein lies the real art of creation—to know exactly when an idea is ripe, when one can use, must use it. More and more I cling to the belief that we conscious people have no control over our creative power. For instance, I slave over a melody and encounter an obstacle which I cannot surmount, however I try. This during the course of an evening; but the next morning the difficulty has surrendered itself, just as though my creative forces had toiled at it over night. Several years ago I told a friend that I meant to compose a symphonic poem, Spring. He repeated my remark, and at the making up of the next music festival programme my Spring was placed and I was asked to conduct it! The work is not even composed yet, despite the great number of themes and sketches I have for it. In fact, I don’t know when I will compose it—if at all. Sometimes a theme occurs first to me, and I find the poetic mate to it later; but at others the poetic idea begins to take on musical form. I may even compose an opera soon. A young Vienna poet has suggested a libretto which appeals to me very much. A libretto of my own is also receiving some consideration from me.

“The old metre of poetry, the iambic and trochiac rhythms—also the rhyme—are useless in music, because the latter has an entirely different rhythm, and this must necessarily destroy that of poetry when the two are joined. According to my opinion, the most available forms are the Nibelungen verses or a free prose. Why cannot music express philosophy? Metaphysics and music are sisters. Even in music one can express a view point, and if one wishes to approach the World Riddle, perhaps it can be done with the aid of music. Is not the third act of Tristan transcendental philosophy purely? Lastly, my next tone-poem will illustrate ‘a day in my family life.’ It will be partly lyrical, partly humorous—a triple fugue, the three subjects representing papa, mamma, and the baby!” This latter is the Sinfonia Domestica of which the first performance anywhere, was announced for March 9, 1904, at Carnegie Hall, New York City.

Jean Marnold, the acute critic of the Mercure de France, calls attention to the “melody of Strauss, which is frankly diatonic, the tonal character definitely determined.” This statement will be challenged by those who take the composer’s middle period as a criterion of his chromatic tendencies. But examine the later themes, and we are forced to agree with M. Marnold. Arthur Symons finds that Strauss is cerebral. He writes: “Strauss is what the French call un cérébral, which is by no means the same thing as a man of intellect. Un cérébral is a man who feels through his brain, in whom emotion transforms itself into idea, rather than in whom idea is transfigured by emotion. Strauss has written a Don Juan without sensuality, and it is in his lack of sensuality that I find the reason of his appeal. All modern music is full of sensuality, since Wagner first set the fevers of the flesh to music. In the music of Strauss the Germans have discovered the fever of the soul. And that is indeed what Strauss has tried to interpret.” W. J. Henderson is open to conviction. He wrote:—

“It is too soon for us to say that Strauss will influence the future. He may leave us nothing but certain purely mechanical improvements in orchestral technics. Even these will have their value. Yet all recent attempts at progress in music have been in the direction of more definite expression, and Strauss may be only a stepping-stone in an advance toward that blissful epoch whose hearers will display as much imagination as its composers, that transcendent condition in which genius understands genius.”

Edward E. Ziegler discerns that Richard Strauss is “a master of music mathematics and one who is composing music for the present. It is an easy evasion,” he adds, “to shift the responsibility for what the living generation cannot easily or will not willingly grasp and to proclaim that such intricate writing is for the future. But music has ever reflected life, and no other composer has so nearly approached a musical expression of our time as has Strauss. The febrile unrest, the neurotic striving of the hour, all have their musical equivalent in his greater compositions. Plying the stress of emphasis as Strauss does is characteristic of the present as is typical his use of the enormous orchestra. All life has become agitated by the exaggeration of the hour. It needed but a master like Strauss to express this truth in music.”

August Spanuth holds that “Richard Strauss may be a monstrous phenomenon, yet he embodies the domineering spirit of modern music. For more than two centuries composers have endeavored to vindicate the cause of programme-music, which the staunch old champions of ‘absolute music’ have fought from the outset. However, after the efforts of Berlioz and Liszt, Richard Strauss has succeeded in reversing the question, making it read thus: Is there a future left for instrumental music outside of the descriptive, pictorial, illustrative, suggestive, and philosophizing music of to-day?”

Ernest Newman, in a masterly article, concludes with this telling passage:—

... This kind of music adds to our knowledge of man and the world as much as does a play of Ibsen or a novel of Tolstoy. Certainly to any one who knows Strauss’s music to Don Quixote, the story of Cervantes is henceforth inconceivable without it; the story itself, indeed, has not one tithe of the humor and the profound sadness which is infused into it by Strauss. What he has done in this work is to inaugurate the period of the novel in music. And here at last we see the subtle fitness of things that has deprived Strauss of those purely lyrical qualities, whose absence, as I have previously argued, makes it impossible for him to be an absolute creator of shapes of pure self-sustained beauty. His type of melody is now seen to be, not a failing, but a magnificent gift. It is the prose of music—a grave, flexible, eloquent prose. His style is nervous, compact, sinuous, as good prose should be, which, as it is related, through its subject-matter, more responsibly to life than is poetry, must relinquish some of the fine abandonment of song, and find its compensation in a perfect blend, a perfect compromise of logic and rapture, truth and ideality. “I can conceive,” says Flaubert, in one of his letters, “a style which should be beautiful; which some one will write one of these days, in ten years or in ten centuries; which shall be rhythmical as verse, precise as the language of science, and with undulations, modulations as of a violoncello, flashes of fire; a style which would enter into the idea like the stroke of a stiletto; a style on which our thoughts would sail over gleaming surfaces, as it were, in a boat with a good wind aft.”

No better description, it seems to me, could be had of the musical style of Strauss, with its constant adaptation to the emotional and intellectual atmosphere of the moment, and its appropriateness to the realistic description of character and milieu which is his mission in music. His qualities are homogeneous; he is not a Wagner manqué nor an illegitimate son of Liszt, but the creator of a new order of things in music, the founder of a new type of art. The only test of a literature being alive is, as Dr. Georg Brandes says, whether it gives rise to new problems, new questionings. Judged by this test, the art of Strauss is the one sign of new and independent life in music since Wagner; for it perpetually spurs us on to the discussion of fresh problems of æsthetics, of psychology, and of form.

V

Richard Strauss is the most intellectual of musicians. Saint-Saëns pointed out long ago the master part harmony would play in the music of the future, and Strauss realized the theory that melody is no longer sovereign in the kingdom of tone; his master works are architectural marvels. In structure, in rhythmical complexity, in striking harmonies, ugly, bold, brilliant, dissonantal, his symphonic poems are without parallel. Berlioz never dared, Liszt never invented, such miracles of polyphony, a polyphony beside which Wagner’s is child’s play and Bach’s is outrivalled. And this learning, this titanic brushwork on vast and sombre canvases, are never for formal music’s sake; indeed, one may ask if it is really music, and not a new art. It is always intended to mean something, say something, paint some one’s soul; it is an attempt to make the old absolute music new and articulate. This flies in the face of Schopenhauer, who declared music to be a presentative, not a representative, art. In his gallery of psychological portraiture Strauss becomes a sort of musical Dostoïevsky. He divines, Maeterlinck-like, the secret tragedy of existence, and paints with delicacy, with great barbaric masses, in colors that glow, poetic and legendary figures which yield up their souls to the psychological genius who questions them. I call the tendency of Strauss décadent, like Wagner’s; both men build up their pictures by a multitude of infinitesimal touches; both men decompose their themes,—and this is the highest art of the decadence. Unity is sometimes absent, and also the power that makes for righteousness, which we find in Beethoven’s music.

Touching on the moral of this new dispensation in art, I may confess that I am puzzled by its absolute departure from the ethic of Christianity. It is not precisely a pagan code that Strauss presents in his splendid laconic manner; rather is it the ethic of Spinoza ravished by the rhetoric of Nietzsche. Affirmation of the will, not its denial, is both preached and practised by this terrible composer. For him the ineluctable barrier of barriers is the return to simplicity, the return to the people. He may be simple in his complex way, and he may sympathize lyrically with the proletarian; yet he is the aristocrat of aristocrats in art; and his art, specialized, nervous, and alembicated, may be the call to arms of lonely, proud souls that refuse to go to the people as did Tolstoy. With Ibsen’s Brand, not Tolstoy’s, Levin is Strauss in closer communion. And he may hold the twentieth century in his hand.

During his Italian trip Strauss wrote Aus Italien, opus 16, a symphonic fantasia that has been heard in America with delight. It is fresh, vigorous, even somewhat popular, in themes, and characteristically colored. The orchestration was the envy of the younger men. Italia was first given in Munich in 1887 under Strauss. His violin sonata, opus 18, was composed the same year. Then followed fast the series of daring orchestral frescos that placed the name of Strauss at the very forefront of living composers. And yet how un-German his music seems, hatched though it be from the very nest of the classics! Strauss is not of the same blood as the Vienna dance composers. He has written a valse; but who could compare the light, voluptuous Danube music to the ecstatic scarlet dance of the Overman in Also sprach Zarathustra! Despite the fact that it is preceded only by Italia, Macbeth, and Don Juan, Tod und Verklärung gives us in esse all the overpowering qualities of Strauss, chiefest of them being imagination without the ugliness detected by sensitive natures in later compositions. Death and Apotheosis is a masterpiece. The nineteenth century, notwithstanding its devotion to the material, produced poets and prose masters for whom death had a peculiar predilection. There is the mystic Maeterlinck, with his sobbing shadowgraphs of Death the Intruder; Tolstoy, with his poignant picture of the Death of Iván Illyitch; Arnold Böcklin, that Swiss master, who sang on elegiac canvas his Toten Insel; and have we not all read Walt Whitman in his matchless threnody “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed”? It is not strange, then, that Strauss, a lyric philosopher of the same passionate pattern as Friedrich Nietzsche, should wrestle with a problem as old as eternity. He does wrestle with it in his symphonic poem—attacking it in large symbolism, free from the morbidities of the decadent poets; accomplishes it in a way that wrings the very heartstrings.

It is the spectacle of a sick man in “a necessitous little chamber” reviewing his struggles and defeats as the fever cracks his veins and throttles his life. He has failed as failed Balzac’s Louis Lambert, as fail all men with lofty ideals. He has reached that “squat tower” of defeat, death, which Robert Browning chanted in Childe Roland. To the dark tower he goes, and dauntless at the last, he sets the slughorn to his lips and blows victory in the very teeth of Death. Perhaps this most modern of poems gives the key to the Strauss music better than any other in the English tongue. The dying man sunken in lethargic slumber, his heart feebly beating in syncopated rhythms, recalls his childhood, his lusty youth, his mad passion for life at its thickest. He toils and reaches summits only to hear the implacable Halt! of destiny. Yet he continues to combat Fate, but to be laid low. And dying, he triumphs; for his ideal lifts him to the heights, to “Sun-Smitten Sunium.” He has dared, and daring conquers. The fable is old—as old as the Prometheus myth. In music we have it incarnated in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the tonality of which—C minor, C major—Strauss has adopted. Liszt, too, in his Tasso, a symphonic setting of Goethe’s tragedy, attempted the same task, and accomplished it in a brilliant, spectacular fashion. The thematic grouping of the Strauss poem is simplicity itself when compared to the towering architectonics of A Hero’s Life and Thus spake Zarathustra. After a lengthy prologue in which mood, atmosphere, Stimmung in a word, and echoes of childish babbling are subtly contrived, the bolt of destruction is let loose, and fever, a spectre, courses through the allegro. The Ideal motive sounds but in gasping, broken accents. It is only after the delirium has reached its climax that a period of repose, an analogy of the lyric period, is attained. The childhood of the man is lisped naïvely; youth and its frolicking unconsciousness are aptly portrayed; manly passion and conflict end the section, for the ominous Halt! is blared out by the trombones. The development—as in all developments of this composer—contains miracles of counterpoint buried in passages of emotional splendor. With cumulative power and pathos we hear a climax of imposing sonorities; the marchlike motive of the Ideal is given in all its majesty, and in a C major of rainbow riches the poem finishes. Strauss has never surpassed the plangency of coloring, the melting sweetness of this score. He is more philosophic in Also sprach Zarathustra, more dramatic in Don Juan, more heroic in Ein Heldenleben; but never has his message been so consoling, never has he set so vividly over his orchestra the arc of promise. That such music came forth from his potent youth is a prophecy of an astounding future. He is the only living issue in music to-day; no other master has his stride, his stature.

That merry old rogue’s tune, Till Eulenspiegel, is a scherzo-like rondo picturing the crazy pranks of the historic Tyll Owlglass. Its grotesque, passionate melancholy, tender violence, its streaks of broad humor interrupted by mocking pathos, its galloping down a narrow avenue, at the end of which looms the gibbet, its mockery of custom, flaunting of the Philistine, and the unrepentant death of Till,—make it a picture unparalleled in music literature. Scored brilliantly, the rondo leaves in its trail a whiff of sulphur and violets. It is fantastic music, fantastically conceived, fantastically executed.

The score of Also sprach Zarathustra is dated “Begun February 4; finished August 24, 1896. Munich.” The composer’s words in this connection must be given:—

“I did not intend to write philosophical music or portray Nietzsche’s great work musically. I meant to convey musically an idea of the development of the human race from its origin, through the various phases of development, religious as well as scientific, up to Nietzsche’s idea of the Uebermensch.”

Only a musical epitome of the creative processes of the cosmos! The modesty of Strauss is of a Michelangelo-like magnitude. This new Faust of music, Nietzsche-Strauss, who would assail the very stars in their courses, has written some pages in this opus that are of imposing grandeur. There is an uplifting roar at the opening, an effect of sunrise—purely imaginary all these musical pictures, yet none the less startling and credible—as Zarathustra’s trumpets solemnly intone his motive. These tremendous chords in their naked simplicity alone proclaim Strauss a man of genius and give him fee simple to the symphonic heritage of Beethoven and Brahms. The A flat section is notably melodious and luscious in color. The five-voiced fugue is ugly yet masterful, and the dance music furious in its abandonment, corybantic in its revelry. Such laughter has never been heard in an orchestra. The melodic curve is passional. Strauss is here tender, dramatic, bizarre, poetic, humorous, ironic, witty, wicked—simple never. The noble art of simplicity he lacks. This is the vastest and most difficult score ever penned. It is a cathedral in tone, sublime and fantastic, with its grotesque gargoyles, hideous flying abutments, exquisite traceries, prodigious arches, half gothic, half infernal, huge and resounding spaces, gorgeous façades, and heaven-splitting spires,—a mighty musical structure! We go to the rear-world, are in religious transports, are swept on the passional curves of that fascinating C minor theme “of Joys and Passions” and repelled by the fugal aspect of Science. There is “holy laughter” and dancing; the dancing of the midget, man, in the futile, furtive gleam of sunshine that bridges the Past and the Future with the Present. Then those twelve bell strokes—“deep eternity” is heard in the humming of the metal, and the close is of enigmatic tonality. Nothing as audacious was ever penned by the hand of man—in music.

The Nature theme is ingeniously designed. It is, in the most natural of tonalities, C major, and consists of C, the fifth, and the octave above it. The third is missing out of the chord, and this makes the “tonal sex” of the chord variable. It is, says Merian, hermaphroditic, as is Nature itself. Major and minor are not yet divided. And the missing third makes this theme one of the World Riddle: “It is the sphinx Nature, who is staring at us with empty, lustreless eyes, inviting confidence, yet awesome.”

In the midst of the dancing orgy of joy sounds the bell of midnight. This is the final division, The Song of the Night Wanderer. Nietzsche, in the later editions of his book, gave this chapter the heading, The Drunken Song; and on the heavy strokes of Brummglocke he wrote:—

One!

O man, take heed!

Two!

What speaks the deep midnight?

Three!

I have slept, I have slept—

Four!

I have awaked out of a deep dream—

Five!

The world is deep,

Six!

And deeper than the day thought.

Seven!

Deep in its woe—

Eight!

Joy, deeper still than heart sorrow:

Nine!

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.

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.

Then follows, after a new theme rich in characterization, the theme of Sancho Panza, for the bass clarinet and bass tuba; later always on the viola. The fat shoulders, big paunch, the mean, good-natured, lying, gluttonous, constant fellow are limned with the startling fidelity that Gustave Doré or Daniel Vièrge attained—for music can give the sense of motion; it is par excellence the art of narration.

The ten variations which ensue are masterpieces. We no longer ask for the normal eight-bar euphonious melody, for the equable distribution of harmonies, for order, rhythm, mass, and logic; but, with suspense unconcealed, follow the line of the story, amazed, delighted, perplexed, angered, piqued, interested—always interested by the magic of the narrator. The adventure with the windmills; the victorious battle against the host of the great emperor Alifanfaron; dialogues of Knight and Squire; the meeting with the Penitents and the Knight’s overthrow; his vigil; the encounter with his Dulcinea; the ride through the air; the journey in the enchanted boat; the conflict with the two magicians; the combat with the Knight of the Silver Moon; and the overthrow of Don Quixote and his death,—are so many canvases upon which are painted with subtle, broad, ironic, and naïve colors the memorable history heretofore hinted at. The realistic effects, notably the use of the wind machine in Variation VII, are not distasteful. Muted brass in Variation II suggests the plaintive m-a-a-h-s of a herd of sheep. The grunting of pigs, crowing of roosters, roaring of lions, and hissing of snakes were crudely imitated by the classic masters; while in the Wagner music-dramas may be discovered quite a zoölogical collection. Nor is the wind machine so formidable as it is said to be. It is an effect utilized to represent the imaginary flight through the air in a wild gale of Knight and Squire on a wooden Pegasus. We know that it is pure imagination, for the growling tremolo of the double basses on one note tells the listener that the solid earth has really never been abandoned.

Throughout, there are many ravishing touches of tenderness, of sincere romance; and the finale is very pathetic. His reason returns—wonderfully described—and the poor, lovable Knight, recognizing his aberration, passes gently away. Here Strauss utilizes a device as old as the hills, and one heard in the B minor symphony of Tschaïkowsky. It is sort of a basso ostinato, the tympani obstinately tapping a tone as the soul of the much-tried man takes flight. Perhaps the accents of a deep-seated pessimism may be overheard here—for I believe Richard Strauss too great a nature to remain content with his successes. He recalls to me in this poem the little mezzotint of John Martin, where Sadak in search of the waters of oblivion painfully creeps over the cruel edges of terrifying abysses to misty heights, upon which still more appalling dangers await the intrepid soul.

Strauss has only reached the midway of his mortal life. A stylist, a realist in his treatment of his orchestral hosts, a psychologist among psychologists, a master of a new and generous culture, a thinker, above all an interpreter of poetic and heroic types of humanity, who shall say to him: Dare no further! His audacity is only equalled by his mental serenity. In all the fury of his fantasy his intelligence is sovereign over its kingdom.

II
PARSIFAL: A MYSTIC MELODRAMA

I will open my dark saying upon the harp.

—Psalm xlix.

When a certain famous Wagner conductor was in New York not long ago, he related to musical friends an astonishing story. He had seen, he declared, the manuscript autobiography of Richard Wagner at Wahnfried, in Bayreuth, which is to remain unpublished until the expiration of a certain period. This conductor did not hesitate to clear up a mystery that, nevertheless, has been an open secret in Germany for many years—Wagner’s parentage. The conductor said that Wagner admitted he was the son of Ludwig Geyer. Ludwig Geyer, painter, poet, dramatist, composer, actor, stage manager,—a versatile man in everything,—was of Hebraic ancestry. Wagner, therefore, had a moiety of the blood, and his son Siegfried more than his father, for Cosima Liszt (von Bülow) Wagner’s maternal grandparents were the Jewish bankers Bethmann of Frankfort-on-the-Main. Mr. Henry T. Finck—whose Wagner biography still remains the standard one in the language—once remarked upon the fact that at Wahnfried, Bayreuth, the pictures of Wagner’s mother and Ludwig Geyer may be seen, but that of his reputed father is not on view. Nietzsche, often a prejudiced witness when his antipathies are aroused, wrote: “Was Wagner German at all? We have some reasons for asking this. It is difficult to discern in him any German trait whatsoever. Being a great learner, he has learned to imitate much that is German—that is all. His character itself is in opposition to what has been hitherto regarded as German—not to speak of the German musician! His father was a stage player named Geyer. A Geyer is almost an Adler—Geyer and Adler are both names of Jewish families.” The above was written about 1887-1888. Setting aside the statement that Wagner was un-German as meaningless,—men of genius are generally strangers to their nation,—the other assertion only shows that Nietzsche was in possession of the secret. He was an intimate of the Wagner household and knew its history.

And what does this prove? Only that the genius of Richard Wagner, tinctured with Oriental blood, betrayed itself in the magnificence of his pictorial imagination, in the splendor of his music, in its color, glow, warmth, and rhythmic intensity. It also accounts for his pertinacity, his dislike of Meyerbeer and Heine and Mendelssohn. He was essentially a man of the theatre, as was Meyerbeer, though loftier in his aims, while not so gifted melodically. In sooth, he owes much to the Meyerbeer opera and the Scribe libretto,—Scribe, who really constructed one of the first viable dramatic books—withal old-fashioned—for musical setting.

And nothing is more useless than to pin Wagner down to his every utterance in poem or speech. As Bernard Shaw has acutely pointed out, Wagner—versatile, mercurial, wonderful Wagner—was a different being every hour of the day. He explained matters to suit his mood of the moment,—a Schopenhauerian one hour, a semi-Christian the next. Liszt, Glasenapp, Heckel, Feustel, all show different portraits of this man. A German democrat he was—and a courtier, an atheist, and yet a mystic. Wagner was all things to all men, like men of his supple imagination.

He abused conductors for playing excerpts from his music in concert, and then conducted concerts devoted to his own works. He wrote pamphlets on every subject, and with the prerogative of genius contradicted them in other pamphlets. He was not always a Wagnerian, and at times he differed with himself in the interpretation of his compositions. He was a genius beset by volatile moods, a very busy man of affairs, and a much-suffering creature. Wandering about the world for a half-century did not improve his temper, and yet next to Nietzsche there is no one whose judgments on Wagner’s music I would regard with more suspicion than—Richard Wagner’s. He was a born satirist. He loved to play practical jokes, and it would not be surprising if some day we should learn that Parsifal was one of his jokes on an epical scale. Remember how he mocked Mozart and Beethoven and the symphonic form in his own C major symphony, as if to say, “I, too, can cover the symphonic canvas!” No, Wagner is a dangerous authority to quote upon Wagner.

Though Liszt was only two years older than Wagner, he was a musician of experience when Wagner was still a youth. While at the age of eighteen Wagner published his first sonata, opus 1, which was written under the direct influence of Haydn and Mozart, Liszt at the same age had already sketched a great revolutionary symphony, the slow movement of which, on Liszt’s own showing, has survived in his eighth symphonic poem, Héróïde Funèbre. By reference to these two early works, it is easy to determine which of these two masters was the first to open up new paths. Similarly we find that, during the Rienzi period, Liszt had already adopted new forms for his compositions of that date. In Wagner’s later works there often appear themes which note for note have been anticipated by Liszt. Compare, for their thematic formation, musical construction, and general coloring, Orpheus and Tristan and Isolde, the Faust symphony and Tristan, the Faust symphony and Die Walküre, Benediction de Dieu dans le Solitude and Isolde’s Liebestod, Die Ideale and the Ring,—Das Rheingold in particular,—Invocation and Parsifal, Hunnenschlacht and Kundry-Ritt, The Legend of Saint Elizabeth and Parsifal, Christus and Parsifal, Excelsior and Parsifal, not to mention many others.

The principal theme of the Faust symphony is to be found in Die Walküre, and one of its most characteristic themes appears note for note as the Blick motive in Tristan and Isolde. The Gretchen motive in Wagner’s A Faust Overture is also derived from Liszt, and the opening theme of the Parsifal prelude closely follows the earlier written Excelsior of Liszt. It was during a rehearsal at Bayreuth in 1876 that Wagner suddenly seized Liszt by the arm and exclaimed, “Now, papa, here comes a theme which I got from you!” “All right,” replied the amiable Liszt, “one will then at least hear it.” The theme in question is the one in the fifth scene of the second act, which serves to introduce and accompany Sieglinde’s dream-words, “Kehrte der Vater nun heim?” This theme—see page 179 of Kleinmichael’s piano score—appears at the beginning of Liszt’s Faust symphony, which Wagner had heard at a festival of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musik Verein in 1861, and during which he burst forth with these words, “Music furnishes us with much that is beautiful and sublime; but this music is divinely beautiful.” Wagner owed much to Liszt besides money, sympathy, and a wife.

Even in the matter of the Niebelungenlied Wagner was anticipated by Friedrich Hebbel, whose somewhat prosaic dramatic version was first given at Weimar, in the Grand Ducal Theatre, May 16, 1861. The author’s wife, a well-known actress, essayed the principal rôle. A critic said of this Trilogy, “No one hitherto has collated the whole dramatic treasure of the Niebelung legends and made it playable upon the modern stage.” Yet, who to-day remembers Hebbel, and who does not know Wagner’s Trilogy?

But this indebtedness of one genius to another is often sadly misinterpreted. Handel helped himself, in his accustomed royal manner, to what he liked, and the tunes of many composers whose names are long since forgotten are preserved in his scenes like flies in amber. Shakespeare did not hesitate to appropriate from Plutarch and Montaigne, from Bandello and Holinshed,—yet he remains Shakespeare. Wagner, perhaps, was not cautious; and Liszt is too important a composer to have been thus treated, too important, and also too much of a contemporary. Why should we cavil? Wagner made good use of his borrowings, and it is in their individual handling and development that he still remains Richard Wagner.

Richard Strauss once said: “How necessary to every composer who writes for orchestra the contact with that body is, I will show you in one example. It is well known that when Wagner conducted for the first time Lohengrin, many years after its completion, he exclaimed, ‘Too much brass!’ In his exile he also wrote Tristan and Isolde, a tone-poem which makes over-great demands upon the orchestra and the singers. Parsifal, however, he wrote at Bayreuth. He had regained intimate feeling again with the orchestra and the stage. Hence I recognize in Parsifal a model of instrumental reserve.”

This quite bears out Arthur Symons’s contention that the best way to study a great artist is in the works of his decline, when his invention is on the wane. Another thing, and this should settle the controversy over that much discussed phrase, “Bühnenweihfestspiel,” Hanslick, Wagner’s heartiest opponent, wrote in 1882: “I must say at once that the ecclesiastic scenes in Parsifal did not at the performance produce nearly as offensive an effect as they do on one who merely reads the text-book. The actions we see are of a religious character, but with all their dignified solemnity they are nevertheless not in the style of the church, but entirely in the operatic style. Parsifal is and remains an opera, even though it be called a Bühnenweihfestspiel.”

Touching on the acrimonious controversy over Parsifal’s blasphemy, I may only say—to every one their belief. No one is forced to see the melodrama, for a mystic melodrama it is, with the original connotations of the phrase. The entire work is such a jumble of creeds that future Bauers, Harnacks, Delitzsches, and other ethical archæologists will have a terrible task if the work is taken for a relic of some tribal form of worship among the barbarians of the then remote nineteenth century. Here in America, the Land of the Almighty Hysteria, this artificial medley of faded music and grotesque forms is sufficiently eclectic in character to set tripping the feet of them that go forth upon the mountains in search of new, half-baked religions.

And now to a complete analysis of the work, an analysis, be it said, first made at Bayreuth in August, 1901. That it may prove unpleasant reading for some I do not doubt. I only hope that I shall not be accused of artistic irreverence. The personal equation counts for something in criticism. I cannot admire Parsifal, and I am giving my reasons for this dislike. There is no reason why the criticism that has so royally acclaimed the beauty of Wagner’s other music-dramas should be suspected in the case of Parsifal. Why should Parsifal be hedged as if of “sacred character”? If you tell a Parsifalite that the opera is blasphemous, he proves volubly, ingeniously, that it is pure symbolism, that Saracenic, Buddhistic, any but Christian, ceremonial is employed. But if you turn the tables, and assert that Parsifal is not sacred, that it should be enjoyed and criticised like Tristan and Isolde, the Parsifalite quickly jumps the track and exclaims, “Sir, there is sacred atmosphere in Parsifal, and not in Tristan!” Oh, this sacred atmosphere! It is worse than Nietzsche’s Holy Laughter! The question may be summed up thus: If Parsifal is blasphemous, it should not be tolerated; if it is not a representation of sacred matter, then we have the privilege of criticising it as we do a Verdi or a Meyerbeer opera; and Meyerbeer was an inveterate mocker of religious things—witness Les Huguenots, Robert le Diable, Le Prophète. How about Halévy’s La Juive? Parsifal, so it appears to me, is more morbid than blasphemous.

Ready-made admiration is dangerous. It behooves us to study Parsifal for ourselves, and not accept as gospel the uncritical enthusiasms of the Wagnerite who is without a sense of the eternal fitness of things. One ounce of humor, of common sense, puts to flight the sham ethical and the sham æsthetical of the Parsifal worshippers. And level-headed study should prove of profit. The composition is a miracle of polyphonic architecture—and it is also the weakest that its creator ever planned.

PARSIFAL

Parsifal a vaincu les filles, leur gentil

Babil et la luxure amusante et sa pente

Vers la chair de garçon vierge que cela tente

D’aimer les seins légers et ce gentil babil.

Il a vaincu la femme belle au cœur subtil

Étalant ces bras frais et sa gorge excitante;

Il a vaincu l’enfer, et rentre dans sa tente

Avec un lourd trophée à son bras puéril.

Avec la lance qui perça le flanc suprême!

Il a guéri le roi, le voici roi lui-même

Et prêtre du très-saint trésor essentiel;

En robe d’or il adore, gloire et symbole,

Le vase pur où resplendit le sang réel,

—Et, ô ces voix d’enfants chantant dans la coupole.

—Paul Verlaine.

I
THE BOOK

Parsifal was published in book form on December 25, 1877. The first act was completed during the winter of 1877-1878, and the instrumentation of the prelude finished by December 25, 1878. The spring and summer of 1878 were devoted to the second act, a sketch of which was prepared October 11 of the same year. The third act was finished by April 25, 1879, and from 1878 to 1882 the gigantic task of orchestration was undertaken. In the copying of this Wagner was assisted by the late Anton Seidl and Engelbert Humperdinck. The entire first act was not completed until the spring of 1880. In a villa near Naples he finished the second act, with its garden scene; and in Palermo, January 13, 1882, the sacred music-drama was given its final form. July 28 of the same year Parsifal was first performed at Bayreuth, with Materna as Kundry, Winklemann as Parsifal, Reichmann as Amfortas; Kindermann sang the phrases allotted to Titurel, and Scaria was Gurnemanz. The Klingsor was Karl Hill. Hermann Levi conducted. Thus much for dry statistics.

“Besides my Siegfried,” Wagner wrote August 9, 1849, to Uhlig, “I have in my mind two tragic and two comic subjects; but not one of them seems to me to be suitable for the French stage. I have just found a fifth one; it is indifferent to me in what language it will appear first; it is Jesus of Nazareth. I have the intention to offer it to the French and thus to get rid of the whole affair, for I foresee the indignation this project will excite in my collaborator.” Wagner’s plan was to make a play in which Christ would be tempted by Mary Magdalen. This idea was abandoned. With the conception of Tristan and Isolde came the scheme for a Parsifal. He wrote of this to Liszt in 1876, being full of Schopenhauer and Buddhism at the time. The Victors was the sketch found among his papers, the hero of which is the Eastern prince Ananda, who rejects the love of the beautiful Princess Prakriti, and by this act of renunciation achieves his and the woman’s redemption. Parsifal is not far removed from this sketch. In 1857 near Zurich Wagner became obsessed by the idea, and on a Good Friday the genesis of Parsifal occurred. In 1864 this sketch, at the request of Ludwig II, was carefully developed, and became the complete music-drama.

Wagner has rooted his story in the old legends and history of Wolfram von Eschenbach and Chrétien de Troies. The latter wrote his poem in 1175, Perceval the Gaul; or, the Story of the Grail; the former was composed between 1201 and 1210. But the story was centuries old before Chrétien handled it, its origin probably being Provençal. And before that it may have sprung from the Moorish, from the Egyptian, from the Indian, from the very beginnings of literature, for it is but the old story of might warring against right, evil attempting to seduce good. It crops out in a modified form in the Arthurian cycle, for the Round Table and the Grail are united in one. Whether Perceval, Parzival, or Parsifal, we find the guileless young hero fighting against wrong and resisting evil. There is even a Romance of Peredur to be found in the Mabinogion or Red Book, a collection of Welsh romances. Some believe this Peredur to be the prototype of the French Perceval. In all these poems there is a Kundry, or Kondrie, or Orgeleuse, a sorceress; and a King who has sinned—Le Roi Pécheur. The Knighthood of the Grail is a consecrated community that worships the sang-real, the precious blood of Jesus Christ, which some say was caught up in a goblet after the soldier Longinus pierced the side of the Saviour on Calvary. This lance also plays an important part in the poems, and in Wagner’s music-drama. Montsalvat is a beautiful temple in a far-away land—presumably Spain—where the knights of the Grail, or Graal, meet to receive spiritual nourishment from the holy chalice containing God’s blood. Every year a white dove descends from heaven to lend new powers and strength to the miraculous vase inclosing the blood. These knights are vowed to chastity, and it was a sin against chastity committed by Amfortas that caused the monarch all his suffering. Kundry it was who tempted the King. Klingsor, the enchanter, a eunuch by his own act, prompts Kundry to all this evil. Gurnemanz, the aged servitor of the Grail, and Titurel, the dead King, though miraculously alive, father of Amfortas, make up the rest of the characters in this strange drama of pity and renunciation.

Wagner saw many opportunities in the legends and poems, and as was his wont synthesized them in the shape we know as Parsifal. His Parsifal is a born innocent, a pure fool. Wagner pretended to derive the word from Parsi-fal or Fal-Parsi—i.e. Pure Fool—born after the death of his father, Gamuret, and living alone with his mother, Herzeleide, in the woods. Attracted by a cavalcade of shining knights he follows it and finally enters the domain of the Grail. Let us leave him there and consider that curious composition of the poet-musician—Kundry. Wagner found some of her characteristics in the old poems, but to him belongs the credit of creating the woman we see in his drama. She is Kundry the enchantress, Herodias, who laughed at Christ, who had John the Baptist beheaded—“she is said to have laughed when she bore aloft the head,” and it breathed upon her, thus condemning her to eternal wandering. Besides this, Kundry is also Gundryggia of the Northern nymphs, the slaying Valkyr. A type of the eternal temptress, and yet a Magdalen, Wagner calls her the Rose of Hell, the She Devil, a tempestuous spirit, a perpetual seducer. She is under Klingsor’s rule, though she humbly serves the Grail Knights in their estate when she is not asleep. Asleep, Klingsor can summon her as he wills, and then, instead of the Beneficent Kundry, she becomes the Demon Kundry.

Now follows the story of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal, which I condense with the help of Maurice Kufferath’s version and from the epitomes of von Wolzogen, Albert Heintz, and many others. It is assumed before the curtain rises that the spectator is acquainted with the tale of the foolish lad Parsifal and his roaming in the forest, bow and arrow in hand, in pursuit of the “shining men mounted upon noble steeds.” He loses his way and enters the region of the Grail. At this point the curtains part and we see a deep wood in a mountainous district. The book of the play tells us of the scene of action: “The domains and Castle Montsalvat of the Guardian of the Grail, with scenery characteristic of the northern mountains of Gothic Spain. Later Klingsor’s enchanted castle on a southern slope of the same mountains, looking toward Moorish Spain.” The scene in Act I represents a clearing upon the border of a beautiful lake. It is morning. Stretched in slumber upon the ground are Gurnemanz, a pious, hale old servant of the Grail, and two squires. Brass music awakens them, and after prayer they prepare to attend the King Amfortas, who is at the very moment approaching the lake for his bath—he suffers cruelly from his wound. Two knights appear and inform the others of this suffering. The balsam of Gawain is without effect. Suddenly there appears on the edge of the forest a terrible figure. It is Kundry. Wagner thus indicates her appearance: “in wild garb fastened high with a hanging girdle of snakes’ skins; black hair, flowing in loose tresses; dark brown, reddish complexion, piercing black eyes, at times flaming wildly, but oftener fixed as in death.” She brings from Arabia a balsam to soothe the King’s pain. Enter Amfortas. He seeks the cool of the forest after his night of agony. The lake, too, will give him some surcease to his pain. But Gurnemanz knows better: “But One thing helpeth—One the helper,” he mutters. Amfortas repeats the prophecy that once in letters of fire appeared about the rim of the Grail vase: “Durch Mitleid wissend, der reine Thor, harre sein, den ich erkor;” that is, “By pity waken’d the blameless Fool, him await my chosen tool.” The King longs for death. Kundry offers him the balsam. “Of what use the balm? All is useless; rather a bath in the waters of the lake.” The litter bearing the royal sufferer moves sadly and slowly away, while Kundry crouches down like a hunted wild animal. The squires tease her until Gurnemanz recalls to them that even beasts are sacred within the territory of the Grail. Then follows a long recital by the elder man, who, in reply to questions, relates the story of Amfortas and his sin.

Klingsor, enraged at being denied admission to the Order of the Grail after his mad act of self-mutilation, raised by his infernal arts a magic castle and gardens not far from Montsalvat. This he filled with lovely girls, who tempted the Knights of the Round Table. Amfortas resolved to destroy this Castle of Perdition. Armed with the sacred lance which pierced the Saviour’s side he laid siege to Klingsor’s abode. Unluckily for him a supernaturally beautiful woman, Kundry, was sent by Klingsor,—whose heart was black with envy,—and waylaid by her Amfortas succumbed to her fascinations. As he was clasped in her embrace the spear dropped and was seized by Klingsor, who gave him a fatal thrust in the side. No alleviation was there for this pain. Even the mystic bread which he occasionally dared to dispense to his knights did not bring ease. Klingsor kept the sacred spear, and by its aid hoped some day to capture Montsalvat itself.

When Gurnemanz finishes this harrowing tale the four squires kneel and sing the above prediction, “Durch Mitleid wissend.” Cries are suddenly heard, and knights rush in to inform their horrified hearers that a blasphemer has dared to enter the sacred park and shoot one of the swans. The culprit is dragged in. It is Parsifal, with his bow and arrow. The swan lies in death throes before him. While vainly endeavoring to discover his name, his identity, Gurnemanz reproaches him for having shed innocent blood, and points out to him the heinousness of his offence. Parsifal is overcome with shame—and pity. Here is first indicated the cardinal trait of his character. He relates to Gurnemanz the little he knows of his early life—with which the reader is already acquainted—and tells of his mother Herzeleide. Kundry sneeringly interrupts. His mother is dead from sorrow at her boy’s desertion. Parsifal, raging, throws himself upon the woman, but is dragged away. The truth forcing itself upon him, he grows faint and is revived by water from a spring. At this juncture Kundry grows sleepy. Well she knows—though the others do not—that her master is about to summon her. Filled with despair she staggers into the bushes and is seen no more. Gurnemanz, his heart revived by the pure foolishness of the lad, begins to hope anew, and the King’s litter returning to the palace, he again questions Parsifal. “What is the Grail?” asks in turn the youth. Then the pair appear to move slowly, and the scene changes, to the accompaniment of the sombre “Verwandlungsmusik,” from the forest to rocky galleries, finally to the Byzantine hall of the Holy Grail. All this is accomplished by scenery which moves in grooves. Parsifal questions Gurnemanz as to this phenomenon. “I slowly tread, yet deem myself now far,” he says. “Thou seest, my son, to space time changeth here,” answers Gurnemanz, which is a choice metaphysical morsel for the admirers of Kant and Schopenhauer.

Now begins the most solemn scene of the music-drama. To the pealing of bells, the intoning of trumpets and trombones, the scene of the Holy Grail is inaugurated. Into the vast hall files the cortége of the sick monarch, and the Grail Knights, wearing white coats of arms, a dove embroidered upon a red mantle, advance in double lines and group themselves about the table. They chant, and boys’ voices from the middle part of the dome reply, while children’s voices in the cupola high above join in a celestial chorus. After a profound silence the voice of Titurel issues from his tomb behind the throne. The dead man is revived by the potency of the Grail. He bids his erring son to perform the sacred office, to uncover the Holy Grail. Then follows a dramatic episode. Conscious of his unworthiness and showing his bleeding side, Amfortas long resists the request of his father. It is a part of his expiation that, sinner as he is, he must officiate at the solemn sacrifice. His protests are not heeded. The children’s voices from the cupola recall the prediction, “Durch Mitleid wissend.” Exhausted, pale, and suffering untold agonies, Amfortas lifts the crystal vase, the Grail. A ray of piercing pure light falls from above on the chalice—the hall is now dark—which becomes luminous and glows with purple splendor. Amfortas sings, “Take this bread, it is my flesh; take this wine, it is my blood which love has given thee.” The singing by the various choirs breaks forth anew, and as daylight returns the holy ceremonies conclude with the kiss of peace by the brethren. The King is carried away, the knights withdraw as the voices from the cupola sing, “Happy in faith, Happy in love.” Parsifal, who has been staring about him all this time, is interrogated by Gurnemanz. The latter has not noticed the convulsive start made by the pure fool when he sees Amfortas fall back upon his couch. Pity has entered his heart, though he is not able to voice this sentiment to Gurnemanz. The latter, angered by such seeming stupidity, thrusts him roughly from the hall, bidding him go seek a goose for his gander. Then, saddened by this fresh disappointment, the old man stands alone in the hall. Like a gleam of hope an alto voice from the mysterious height repeats the prediction, “Durch Mitleid wissend,” and is joined by boys’ voices. To this music the curtains close.

As in the Rheingold, where Nibelheim follows Walhalla, Wagner gains a violent contrast by placing the action of the second act in Klingsor’s dread castle. The scene represents the magician’s laboratory—a sort of Faust-like chamber at the top of a tower. The place is in semi-darkness, a well-like abyss to the left evoking a feeling of anticipation. A narrow staircase ascends to an aperture in the wall, an azure slit of the sky being revealed. The floor is strewn with implements of sorcery, and on the steps Klingsor, an Arabian, and fierce looking man with a black beard, is seated gazing into a wizard’s metallic mirror. By its aid he perceives Parsifal approaching the castle, having already forgotten his experiences in Montsalvat and haled by Klingsor’s spell. With a cry of satisfaction the magician leaves his vantage post, descends, and approaches the chasm. Throwing incense into it he begins his cabalistic spells; “Up, Kundry, ascend from the gulf! Come to me. Thy master calls thee, thou nameless one, primal fiend, rose of hell! Thou who wert Herodias, and what more! Once Gundryggia, now Kundry; up, up, to thy master; obey him who has sole power over thee!”

A lovely woman appears enveloped in a misty veil. It is Kundry. She screams, a blood-curdling scream which modulates into a feeble, whimpering moan. The dialogue which ensues is not a pleasing one. Klingsor berates the woman for serving the knights like a beast of burden, as reparation for her crime against Amfortas. She sneers at his lost powers, and absolutely refuses to seduce the approaching Parsifal. But in vain she resists her master. A sound of battle is heard. Single-handed, Parsifal, without, routs the feeble, enslaved knights of Klingsor. From his window in the battlements the wizard views the strife with satisfaction. He would be pleased to see his weak servitors killed by this robust, handsome youth. Kundry vanishes to prepare for her fell work of destruction. The tower sinks to strange, thunderous noises, and we behold Parsifal in a many-colored tropical garden, dense with flowers of an unearthly hue and splendor. Almost immediately he is surrounded by girls, living flowers who coquet, tease, and lure him to ravishing music. The scene is a gay one. Parsifal repulses one group after another, when suddenly a voice sings, “Parsifal, stay.” He is deeply moved. “Parsifal? Thus once my mother called me.” He remembers his name at last. Thus does Wagner subtly indicate the growing knowledge that passion reveals. A scene of temptation follows that has no parallel in art or literature. Lulling the youth’s chaste suspicions by telling him of his mother Herzeleide, she at last wins him to her side and imprints upon his lips his mother’s kiss, her own magic kiss. Instead of succumbing Parsifal leaps to his feet and presses his heart. He cries in agony, “Amfortas! the wound—the wound! It burns within me, too.” Kundry’s kiss shows him what the entire Grail did not know—that she was the cause of the King’s downfall. He understands all now, and his one thought is to go to the King and relieve his pain. He is the poor fool who pities. Mad and desperate, Kundry detains him. She believes that he can, if he so wills it, release her from Klingsor’s hideous spell. He is to be her saviour; a second one, not the real Jesus at whom she laughed and meeting whose reproachful gaze she forever after wandered. She is the real Woman who laughed. Her laughter shudderingly resounds throughout hell, whenever a sinner yields to her seductions. But Parsifal is different. Perhaps, being a frequenter of the Grail land, and a very Erda for wisdom, Kundry knows of the prediction. She weaves a web of voluptuous beauty; Parsifal escapes its blandishments. Then finding that this fails, she curses him, with furious and hysterical curses. “Renounce desire; to end thy sufferings thou must destroy their source.” Thus Parsifal enjoins her. But Kundry will not be convinced. “My kiss it was that made thee clear-sighted. My embrace would make thee divine.” He asks for the road to Amfortas. She curses him. “Never, never, shall thou find that road again. The Saviour’s curse gives me power. Wander!” She frantically summons Klingsor, who appears upon the terrace with poised spear. The flower girls rush in, and Klingsor hurls the weapon at the audacious intruder. But it whizzes over Parsifal’s head, where floating in the air he seizes it and makes the sign of the cross. A cataclysm ensues. The castle and garden sink into the earth, accompanied by volcanic explosions, the flower girls become withered hags, and all the enchanting vista of flowers is transformed into an arid waste. Kundry falls to the ground prostrated. Parsifal, surveying this desolate ruin from the shattered ramparts, utters to Kundry these prophetic words, “Thou knowest where to find me.” Immediately the curtains veil this effective scene.

Act III brings us back to the Grail confines, where a tender, idyllic landscape on the edge of a forest discloses a hermit’s hut, with a spring hard by. It is a spring morning. Gurnemanz, now a white-haired, sorrowful old man, has relinquished all hope of a saviour for the King. He feels that unless death intervenes, Klingsor will become master of the Grail, for he knows nothing of the stirring events in the preceding act. A low cry in the bushes apprises him of Kundry’s presence. She is half dead, but is revived by the old hermit. She feebly moans, “Service, service,” and then rises and goes to the hut, where she gets a pitcher. This she carries to the spring, and fills. Gurnemanz marvels at her altered and penitential appearance. But she makes signs. One is approaching. A stranger knight in coal black armor, with visor down and spear in hand, is seen. He gravely advances. Gurnemanz asks his name. The stranger shakes his head. Adjured to remove his armor, as it is Good Friday, and no Christian knight must bear arms on that holy day, the stranger obeys. He plants his spear in the ground, removes his shield and sword, unfastens his armor, takes off his helmet, and kneels in fervent prayer before the lance. At once he is recognized by Gurnemanz as the youth who killed the swan, and the lance is also remarked with keen emotion. “Oh, blessed day,” cries the old man, who knows that his King’s saviour is now at hand. Now follows a series of pictures. They move before the eyes like some strange dream in a land where life has resolved itself into processional attitudes. One dissolves into another. The kneeling knight recalls an Albrecht Dürer, and his blessing by Gurnemanz, his baptism of the repentant Kundry,—who utters but two words during the act,—and the washing of his feet Magdalen-like, are all accompanied by music that is almost gesture, and with gestures that are almost musical. Gurnemanz informs Parsifal that Amfortas is in sad extremities, his father, Titurel, no longer strengthened by the Grail, is really dead, and the King refuses to perform the sacred office. It is this great hour of need in which Parsifal appears. Parsifal tells Gurnemanz of his weary wanderings over the earth in search of Montsalvat. Sorely beset by foes, yet he dare not use the sacred spear. It has been kept intact from worldly stain or strife. Then follows the soothing Good Friday magic music episode, when all nature puts on its sweetest attire to give thanks to the Saviour who suffered. Bells are heard. It is noon. As in the first act, but by a different route and accompanied by other music, the scene slowly changes to the domed Temple of the Holy Grail. The funeral services of Titurel are being held. The hall is full of mourning knights. Amfortas, his agony at its apex, refuses to unveil the Grail, and begs his companions to slay him, for he can no longer endure his pain and shame. Parsifal enters, accompanied by Gurnemanz. He witnesses the King’s paroxysm, and then advances to him. With the point of the lance he heals the wound. Kundry dies on the altar steps, and Parsifal, now King of Montsalvat, mounts the step and lifts on high in silent invocation the crystal vase. Mystic voices in the cupola sing “Wondrous work of mercy. Salvation to the Saviour.” Thus the mystic melodrama ends.

In the first draft of his poem Wagner ended the play with these words:—

Great is the charm of desire,

Greater is the power of renunciation.

In all the complicated web of this drama Pity and Renunciation are the two principal motives. Wagner drew his themes from all sources,—sagas, legends, poems, and histories. He incorporated episodes from the Saviour’s life, and boldly utilized the theme of the Last Supper. The blood of Christ which Joseph of Arimathea is said to have received in a chalice becomes the comforting and eucharistic Grail. Then side by side with all these conflicting stories he places the semi-Saracenic Klingsor, the very embodiment of a magician of the Dark Ages, and Kundry, the type of the woman of all times, the wandering Jewess, the Magdalen. Parsifal is a mediæval Jesus; the knights of the Holy Grail, Apostles transposed to a later epoch. As it suited him Wagner violently tossed about and made sport of the poetic ideas of Chrétien de Troies and Wolfram von Eschenbach. He Wagnerized everything he touched. The result is Parsifal.

If the poem is charged to the full with Semitic, Buddhistic, Patristic, Christian, and Schopenhauerian philosophies, the play affords the great master fresco painter superb opportunities for scenic display. The son of Geyer, himself a scene painter, dramatist, poet, and composer, did not fail to take advantage of the chance to indulge his taste for luxuriant, glowing colors, for sensational contrasts, lofty spaces, and all the moving magnificence of panoramic display. There are many tableaux in this drama, genuinely a static drama. In Act I we see Gurnemanz surrounded by the tender squires, while Kundry cowers in the foreground. “Doch Vater sag, und lehr’ uns fein; du kanntest Klingsor, wie mag das sein?” The tableau of the killed swan, with Parsifal admonished by Gurnemanz, is another noteworthy grouping. Nothing is so impressive, however, as the spectacle of the sick King being raised, as he elevates the Grail. Klingsor’s tower is as sinister as an etching by Salvator Rosa. The flower garden, first with the damsels and then desolate, gives two striking pictures. Parsifal stands spear in hand. “Du weisst: we einzig du mich wiedersiehst!” The praying knight in Act III; Parsifal in white baptismal robe, recalling Ary Scheffer’s portrait of Christ, and last of all the noble harmonies of the last scene, the descending dove and the mystic chant:—

Höchsten Heiles Wunder,

Erlösung dem Erlöser.

TO A KINGLY FRIEND

O König! holder Schirmherr meines Lebens!

Du höchster güte wonnereichster Hort!

Was du mir bist, Kann staunend ich nur fassen,

Wenn mir sich zeigt, was ohne dich ich war.

Du bist der holde Lenz, der neu mich schmückte,

Der mir verjüngt der Zweig und Aeste Saft:

—Richard Wagner.

II
THE MUSIC

One is filled with admiration at Wagner’s deft use of thematic material in the score of Parsifal. Despite the exegetical enthusiasm of von Wolzogen, Heintz, and Kufferath, a very few motives suffice the master for his polyphonic skill in development. And they are principally in the prelude—now unhappily a familiar concert room number. I say unhappily because no composer’s music is less adapted to concert than Wagner’s. Divorced from the context of gesture, speech, scenic display, his music becomes all profile. One misses the full, rich, significant glance of the eye. Wagner is a weaver, not a form-maker. He can follow a dramatic situation, or burrow deeply into the core of morbid psychology; but let him attempt to stand alone, to write music without programme or the fever of the footlights—then he is the inferior of several men, the inferior of Liszt, Tschaïkowsky, and Richard Strauss; not to mention Beethoven, Schubert, or Chopin. I know that this opinion ill accords with the belief of many, yet I do not think it can be disputed. His preludes and overtures, containing as they do the leading motives of his dramas, are of interest only for that reason. Considered as absolute music they are not noteworthy, notwithstanding their coloring and grandiose themes. So is it with Parsifal—even more so. The work preëminently smells of the lamp. It lacks spontaneity. Its subject is extremely undramatic. Nothing happens for several hours,—nothing but discourses, philosophical and retrospective. Never has Wagner so laboriously built a book. It is a farrago of odds and ends, the very dust-bin of his philosophies, beliefs, vegetarian, anti-vivisection, and other fads. You see unfold before you a nightmare of characters and events. Without simplicity, without lucidity, without naturalness—Wagner is the great anti-naturalist among composers—this book, through which has been sieved Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Schopenhauerism, astounds one by its puerility, its vapidity. Yet because of his musical genius, Wagner is able to float this inorganic medley, and at times makes it almost credible. It is an astounding feat of the old hypnotist—for hypnotist he is in Parsifal as in no other composition. By sheer force of his musical will, this Klingsor of Bayreuth hypnotizes his hearers with two or three themes not of themselves remarkable, as Charcot controls his patients with a shining mirror.

Wagner always selected librettos that threw up a lot of dust for the erudite. His Tristan demands much delving, and with the Ring and its complementary literature we shall never finish. The plain fact in the case is this: Parsifal, despite all its wealth of legend, its misty, poetic allusiveness, its manufactured mysticism, is simple old-fashioned opera. And its verse quâ verse is very bad. The Wagnerites reject this statement as does the devil holy water. Supposing you enter the Wagner theatre, your brain cells unencumbered with the memories of Perceval, Parzival, Parsifal, Fal-Parsi, and the rest of the philological mystification, what do you see?—and remember that the ideal drama should set forth without previous knowledge or explanation its dramatic content.

You see an old-fashioned and very tedious opera—setting aside some of the music; and there is throughout an abuse of the tremolo that sounds suspiciously Italian. You see a lot of women-hating men, deceiving themselves with spears, drugs, old goblets, all manners of juggling formulas, and yet being waited upon by a woman—a poor, miserable witch. You see a silly youth treated as if he had murdered a human being because he shot a swan. You see this same dead bird borne away on a litter of twigs, to noble, impressive music like a feathered Siegfried. Surely Wagner was without a sense of the humorous; or was he parodying his own Death of Siegfried, as Ibsen parodied Ibsen in A Wild Duck? You see a theatrically imposing temple, modelled after the Duomo of Siena, wherein a maniacal King raves over an impossible wound, and performs ceremonies recalling the Roman Catholic communion service. In Act II you are transported to the familiar land of Christmas pantomime. There a bad magician seeks to destroy the castle of the noble knights, and evokes a beautiful phantom to serve his purpose. There are spells, incantations, blue lights, screaming that makes the blood run cold, and the whole bagful of tricks that Weber, Marschner, and even Mozart delighted in. Follows fast the magic garden, and the sirens with rose petals on head. The foolish boy still eludes temptation. Even the beautiful witch cannot lure him. All is fairy play, pantomimic transformations, castles that crumble, thunder-riven gardens, and the whizzing of a malignant lance. Even that old Gounod ruse, the sign of the cross, is employed, and with overpowering effect. Now what possesses a generation which knows Darwin, has read Herbert Spencer, and can follow with delight the unerring logic of events that unroll themselves in the Ibsen plays—what possesses this generation of ours to sit enthralled before all this nebulosity?

The third act is but a faint replica of the first—without its vigor or novelty. Here the librettist is in sore straits. So he drags in Magdalen washing the feet of Parsifal which is offensively puerile. We again see the scenery acting, pantomimic scenery, and once more we are transported to the Hall of the Holy Grail, where the music of Allegri, Palestrina, and Vittoria is marvellously mimicked. Wagner, not being a strikingly original theme-maker, always borrowed,—borrowed even from Berlioz,—and the results of his borrowings are often greater than the originals. In a beatific blaze of glory—after Parsifal has healed the King—this sacred melodrama ends, and the spectator, drugged by the music, confused by the bells chanting the tortuous story, and his eyes intoxicated by feasts of color, staggers away believing that he has witnessed a great work of art. So he has,—the art of debauch in color, tone, and gesture. “The highest perfection of an art,” says Ehlert, “is not always and necessarily the greatest massing together of forces. It depends upon entirely different conditions. The flower of an art arises only when a positively artistic individuality creates that particular work for which it possesses the most marked and exclusive vocation.” Now Wagner heaps up one art, one idea, upon another. He little cared for the dramatic proprieties or the feelings of his audience when he composed Kundry, a ridiculous hag, an Astarte, a Herodias, a Meg Merrilies, and a Mary Magdalen in one. She is Azucena when she reveals to Parsifal his parentage—perhaps Wagner had heard of Il Trovatore!—and she plays Potiphar’s wife to this effeminate lad. She is of the opera operatic. And Klingsor—is he a creation, this hater of men and women?—why, he is nothing else but any giant or any enchanter in any fairy tale. Parsifal, when he is not a simulacrum of Christ in white baptismal robes, is a peculiarly foolish bore. Without Siegfried’s buoyancy, Wagner tried hard to dower him with Siegfried’s youth. But he is only an emasculate Siegfried. The corpse of Titurel is a horrible idea—yet it fits in this bogie-man’s play. Wagner, after all, was the creature of his century, an incurable Romantic, with all the love of the Romantics for knights, mediæval mysteries, maidens in distress,—in this case a callow boy,—magicians, and dead men who tell tales. The scenery, too, never comes up to one’s realization, and as usual Wagner oversteps the mark by surrounding his hero with too many women. The duo with Kundry is much more effective. The eye and the ear can grasp the situation—a stirringly dramatic one, despite the morbid imagination of the poet who could in his search for voluptuous depravity mingle a mother’s with a courtesan’s kiss. Here Paris itself is surpassed in the piquant and decadent. Wagner’s admiration for Baudelaire’s poetry shows itself in this incident. By the magic of his mother’s name, Kundry evokes a maudlin filial passion, and with his mother’s name on her lips she kisses the youth into the first consciousness of his virility—or a semblance of it, for at no time is Parsifal a normal young man. His act of renunciation, in his particular case, denies life.

Again I ask, What is the lure that gathers multitudes to witness this most nonsensical, immoral of operas? The answer is, The Music, always The Music. Not Wagner at the flood-tide of his musical passion, nor the composer of Tristan and Isolde, or the Ring or Die Meistersinger; yet an aged wizard who had retained his old arts of enchantment, and so great are they that at times he not only makes one forget his book, but even the poverty of his themes—Parsifal is not musically original; rather it is an extraordinary synthesis of styles, an unique specimen of the arts of combination, adaptation, and lofty architectonics. Let us glance at the score.

Never has Wagner been so bald in his exposition as in the prelude. But its simplicity is deceptive. The Love theme,—in A flat, by von Wolzogen named the Love Feast motive,—the Grail Hope theme, the Dresden Amen, and the Faith theme,—these and a subsidiary theme, the Saviour’s Lament, about comprise this overture. And the figure of the Saviour’s agony contains a few of the most poignant bars Wagner ever penned. This short episode is infinitely more sincere than the Faith motive—“What expression would a man like Wagner find for such an experience?” asks Ehlert. The Speech of Promise, i.e. the prediction “Durch Mitleid wissend,” is charmingly prophetic, but the first section of Act I drags both dramatically and musically. I am never disappointed in the Kundry music, for I have long known it in Liszt’s B minor sonata, and before Liszt it may be found in the opening bars of Chopin’s B minor sonata. There is much Liszt in this score. The trick of the twice repeated modulation into the upper diminished third, as in the case of the Faith theme, is an old Lisztian device. Kundry’s chief motive is to be found in the B minor sonata. It is not very characteristic, nor is the evocation of Arabia. Kundry enters on Valkyrie pinions, and the best thing she does is her shuddering screech—that same cry of distress so cleverly utilized by Massenet in Le Cid. Wagner draws heavily upon the second act of Die Walküre. Indeed Parsifal is full of Wagner quotations: Lohengrin, Tristan and Isolde, Die Meistersinger—there is much in Gurnemanz’s bars—and even Götterdämmerung—the Rhine daughters’ music is heard in the garden scene. Amfortas’s suffering motive is not very convincing, nor are we impressed by the Forest Murmur with its canonic appoggiaturas. Ever this essential turn! As in the Good Friday magic spell—written years before the opera—the composer echoes Siegfried and Die Meistersinger,—the first fine, careless rapture of his wood-music he never recaptured. And this is quite natural. An old man, Wagner had reached the end of his ammunition. Many blank cartridges are fired in Parsifal. The Sorcery motive with its Chopin-like chromaticism has meaning; but I confess I do not care for Parsifal’s motive, beautifully as it is developed. It lacks the bold, lusty, clean-cut vigor of his young Siegfried’s horn call. Wagner musically was always true to himself. He unconsciously divined the effeminacy of Parsifal’s nature, and his music is a truer psychological barometer than all the learned pundits who write reams about the purity of Parsifal. Kundry’s Service theme—in “helpful” thirds—is by no means so exquisitely musical as the Mitleid motive in Die Walküre. And what could be more absurd than the use of the Saviour’s Lament motive as the dead swan is reverently carried away. The Herzeleide motive is lovely music, especially when it is thrown into high relief during the next act by Kundry’s blandishments. The fleeting appearance of the Lohengrin Swan motive is a very happy idea.

We have now reached the last part of the first act with its Glockenthema, its laments of Amfortas,—the accents of woe are genuine,—and the magnificent tonal panorama of boys’ voices, bells, choral music. Here, not without reverence, the composer has successfully emulated the service of Rome. The tripartite choral divisions recall both Goethe’s Faust and the spherical order of voices, and the antiphonal choirs of mediæval cathedrals. The effect is indescribable, especially when the pure, sexless boys’ voices are heard a capella. The consummation of this mystical ecstasy is reached when the Grail vase is slowly waved aloft. One realizes that Wagner’s genius, which so often gravitates pendulum-wise between the sublime and the ridiculous, here approaches the former.

Act II, in which the ruling key seems to be B minor,—as A flat predominates the preceding act,—naturally introduces fewer new motives. The Klingsor theme, first heard in Gurnemanz’s slightly tedious recital, and the Kundry theme are most in evidence in the stormy prelude. To be quite frank I always find the Flower Girls’ music a disappointment. The Caress valse theme is a trifle commonplace, and only Wagner’s polyphonic skill lends the music some dignity. The evocation of Kundry by Klingsor in the opening scene is full of demoniacal grandeur. Wagner is nothing if not operatic, and here he shows that his old Weber skin has not been completely shed. Kundry’s galloping motive, also employed for Parsifal, is the familiar Valkyrie figure modified. I heard the Erl-King storm through several bars, and the triplet figuration of the Flower Girls is from a trio in one of Schumann’s symphonies—the B flat, if I remember aright.

The crowning scene of this act—one is tempted to say of the entire work, for Wagner spreads his music thin over a wide surface—is the duo of Parsifal and Kundry. Herein the entire gamut of passion, maternal, exquisite, voluptuous, is traversed by a master hand. And never has Wagner’s touch been so sure. Intellectually nothing could be more complete than this delineation, morbid and morose as it occasionally is. In a dramatic sense it saves the opera. We hear the Parsifal, the Herzeleide motives—and a supplementary Herzeleide theme. The outburst of Parsifal after the kiss with its memories of Amfortas’s suffering is wonderful. The Saviour’s theme, Kundry’s Yearning theme and Self-Abandonment motive, are all made up of familiar material. Here the spinning of the web into something strange and touching is the principal virtue, not the themes themselves. Klingsor’s sudden appearance and the hurled lance which is carried out in the score by harps glissando through two octaves, the mourning cries of the pretty girls, and Parsifal’s final words—all these kaleidoscopic effects impress one considerably; action is paramount. Parsifal’s music in Es startt der Blick dumpff auf das Heil’sgefäss may arouse the indignation of the purist with its direct succession of the G flat major and D minor triads (page 187 of the vocal score); but to modern ears his scheme of harmonization is as normal as the book is abnormal. In a Wagner opera, or, if you will, a music-drama, everything must be accepted, dissonantal harmonies as well. This composer follows every curve of his poem, and when a situation demands jarring ugliness, he freely offers it. Who to-day shall say what is or what is not ugly music?

The music of the last act presents little novel thematic material. In the gloomy prelude we find epitomized the wandering of Parsifal in search of the Grail domain, in conjunction with the funeral music of Titurel. Again the static and contemplative forms a contrast to the rapid action of the preceding scene. The very pauses seem pregnant with music. And I must halt here a moment to lay my tribute of admiration at the feet of Milka Ternina, whose Kundry is a dramatic and musical creation of rare imagination and technical skill. She presents three different women—we are perplexed to say whether Kundry defiant, or Kundry seductive, or Kundry repentant is the most wonderful. But Ternina is always wonderful! It is in this scene, with its sun-smitten meadows, its worshipping knight and mournful penitent, that I agree with those commentators who perceive the profound influence exerted upon Wagner by early German and Flemish religious pictorial art. Parsifal’s attitudes here would suit a Gothic triptych—as M. Charles Tardieu so happily expresses it. There is little movement, all gesture has been transferred to the orchestra, and the spectator seems to be participating in one of those miracle plays or viewing the stiff pictures of a Cimabue or a woodcut after Dürer. The moving forest and the final scene lose because of repetition. But what was the poet to do? Only in Act II does he escape the lack of variety. For instance, in Act I Parsifal stands for a long time immobile, with his back to the audience, while Kundry, in the last act, utters but two words. She is a pantomimic lay figure kept on the stage to emphasize the resemblance between Jesus and Parsifal. And the feet washing episode is absolutely unnecessary. It does not help the story. Nowhere but in Wagner would all this mish-mash of gospel narrative, mediæval romance, and Teutonic philosophy be tolerated. Yet the Wagnerites sit through it all as if listening to a new evangel of art, philosophy, and religion. Perhaps they are. In America, where new religions sprout daily as do potatoes in a dark cellar, slighter causes have led to the foundation of a religion—witness the rise and growth of Mormonism. If religion could ever become moribund, perhaps in Wagner’s Parsifal would be found the crystallization of many old faiths, presented in a concrete, though Wagnerized, form. “I know of but one thing more beautiful than Parsifal,” wrote Alfred Ernest, and approvingly quoted by M. Kufferath, “and that is any low mass in any church.” And in this sentence the French author puts his finger on the weak spot of Parsifal—its lack of absolute sincerity. No matter how great an art work it may be, it yet lacks the truthful note that is to be found at any low mass in a Roman Catholic church—about the most unadorned service I can remember. With all its grandeur, its pathos, its conjuring of churchly and philosophical motives, its ravishing pictures and marmoreal attitudes, Parsifal falls short of the one thing—faith, a faith you may find in any roadside Bavarian cabin. We have seen that it is weakest musically in the Faith motive of the prelude, and ethically it suffers from the same sterility. All the scholarly efforts to make the work an ethical, philosophical, and an artistic message are futile. Parsifal, even if it will “enjoy a small immortality,” must remain an opera, a cunning spectacle devised by a man of genius in the twilight of his powers. It is Wagner’s own Götterdämmerung, the sunset music of his singular career.

But if this Parsifal music lacks the virile glow and imaginative power of his earlier music, it is none the less fascinating. Over all hovers, like the dove in the temple, a rich mellowness, a soothing quality that is the reverse of his stormy, disquieting, youthful art. It really seems as if Pity, pity for the tragedy of existence, for the misery of all animated beings, had filled parts of the score with a soothing balm. The muted pauses, the golden stream of tone, and the almost miraculous musicianship fill the listener with awe. Never before has Wagner’s technical mastery come to such a triumphant blossoming. And the partition is covered with miniatures that excite admiration both for their workmanship and their musical meanings. It was Nietzsche who first called critical attention to the Lilliputian delicacy of Wagner’s music. A fresco painter, he yet finds time to execute the most minute and tender jewel-like bits, that are lost sight and sound of at the first hearing. Never has Wagner’s instrumentation been so smoothly sonorous, so well mixed, so synthetic. It recalls richly embroidered altar cloths or Gobelin tapestry. Weaving similes force themselves upon the hearer when describing this marvellous and modern polyphonic art. But how tell of the surge and undertow of his melting, symphonious narrative! It flashes with all the tints of a Veronese, of a Makart, and then appear in processional solemnity the great flat spaces and still figures of some mediæval, low-toned, distemper painter. Painting and weaving—always these two arts! But there is not the same passionate excess in decoration, the same tropical splendor, that we find in the earlier Wagner. Venus wooes Tannhäuser in more heated accents than does Kundry Parsifal. And Kundry is the depraved woman of all art, for Kundry’s quiver of temptations is more subtle, more decadent.

The correspondence of King Ludwig and Wagner, of Ludwig and Josef Kainz, the actor, throws much light on the enigmatic character of Parsifal. Wagner needed money and encouragement, badly. So it is not difficult to conceive of him playing up to every romantic extravagance of the young king—“le seul vrai roi de ce siècle,” as Paul Verlaine poetically called the monarch, whose madness admirably matched his own. Read in this sense, the psychology of Kundry’s kiss and its repelling effect and its arousing of pity for Amfortas in Parsifal is no longer a mystery. Wagner never erred in his morbid musical psychology, and he thus symbolized Amfortas—Wagner—as being rescued from suffering by Parsifal—Ludwig. Wagner had been ever an ungrateful man, but for the King he entertained the most exalted sentiment of gratitude. There is a psychiatric literature on this esoteric subject in German and French beginning with Oskar Panizza, ending with the remarkable study of Hanns Fuchs, entitled Richard Wagner.

Parsifal will long remain a rare and stimulating spectacle to those for whom religious feeling must be dramatized to be endurable. The stern simplicities of doctrinal truths have no attraction for such. Wagner, luxuriously Byzantine in his faiths, erected a lordly pleasure drama in which the mystically inclined, the admirer of theatrical pomps, and the esoteric worshipper could all find solace, amusement, and consolation. Yet Parsifal’s pale virtue can never stir us to higher issues, as do the heroic sacrifices of Tannhäuser or Senta. Parsifal is the predestinated one, predestined to save the life of the King. Lacking freedom of will, he is not a human being that provokes our sympathy—but why demand logic, even dramatic logic, of Wagner? He was first a musician, then a poet and a philosopher; and in the last of these three was least. Parsifal is his final offering to the world. It is the work of a man who had outlived his genius. Nietzsche quotes with approval the exclamation of a musician: “I hate Wagner, but I no longer stand any other music.” We are all Wagnerians whether we rebel at Parsifal or not.

III
NIETZSCHE THE RHAPSODIST

Tell me, where is justice to be found which is love with seeing eyes?—Also sprach Zarathustra.

I

A sane and complete estimate of the life and philosophical writings of Friedrich Nietzsche has yet to be made in English. Mentally dead since 1889, his death, in a private retreat at Weimar in 1900, created little stir; yet we predict that this great, if rhapsodical thinker, will occupy a place in the pantheon of philosophers. Like Emerson, he formulated no system; he is a stimulus to thought, an antiseptic critic of all philosophies, religions, theologies, and moral systems, an intellectual rebel, a very Lucifer among ancient and modern thinkers.

His life, barring his friendship with Wagner, and its sad conclusion, is rather barren of interest or incident. It was a fiery soul tragedy; outwardly the world saw a quiet, very reserved, almost timid man of cultivated bearing and disinclined to the pursuits of the ambitious. He was born at Röcken, near Lützen, October 15, 1844. His father was a clergyman; indeed he descended from a long line of clerical ancestors, which possibly accounts for the austere strain in the man. This philosopher with a hammer, this demolisher of Antichrist, this writer who outraged all religious Europe, was a man of pure, upright life, a scholar, a gentleman, a poet. Taking up philology mainly as a makeshift, he occupied the chair of classical philology at the University of Basle. His weak eyesight—his life long he was a sufferer from headaches, a weak stomach, and crabbed nerves—drove him to a retirement, during which he busied himself with art and philosophy. The Birth of Tragedy in 1872 attracted Richard Wagner’s attention, for here was a partisan not to be despised. In 1876 Nietzsche published Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, and Wagnerism had found its philosophical exponent. A friendship, ideal in its quality, grew up between composer and thinker. But the sensitive nature of Nietzsche could brook no rivals, and he soon fell away from Wagner and Bayreuth. Many have sought to explain this defection. Nietzsche’s devoted sister, Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, accused Richard and Cosima Wagner of treachery, while Wagner, on his part, found this intense young disciple a trifle irksome. He could not stir, could not talk sportively—as was his wont—could not make bad puns, could not associate with others without a sorrowful apparition warning him that he was not true to himself, not true to his higher nature. Wagner, being a natural man, sometimes a coarse and worldly man, resented this spiritual caretaker’s solicitude, and so in the rush and excitement of Bayreuth in 1876 he was forced to forget his Nietzsche. Then the usual thing happened: the other one went off in a sulk, and Wagnerism had lost its most fanatical adherent.

The truth in this affair is not difficult to discern. When Wagner was still undiscovered—that is, the latter-day Wagner—Nietzsche sailed his soul abroad for spiritual adventures and found the composer of Tristan and Isolde full of spiritual irony. Exclusive, haughty, jealous—a noble sort of jealousy—he published the good news to the world. Then the mob, hoi polloi, began to buy excursion tickets to Bayreuth, and Nietzsche shudderingly withdrew. Wagner’s music was no longer unique, no longer to be savored by the intellectually aristocratic few. So he sailed his bark for newer, rarer, stranger enterprises and discovered—Nietzsche. After that the madhouse yawned for him, and the world lost a wonderful man, an ecstatic, semi-deranged man, a freethinker who out-topped all freethinkers, one of the greatest individualists since Stirner, and a soul of poetic richness. In 1888 Der Fall Wagner was published and Nietzsche’s friends and foes alike noted the decline of a brilliant intellect. The book is extraordinary. In it are flashes of dazzling fugitive ideation; but it lacks logic, nobility of design; above all, it lacks coherency. Wagner is as bitterly arraigned and attacked as the apostle of degeneration, as before he was hailed as the Dispenser of the New Evangel of music, poetry, and philosophy. It is a pity that this violent work should have introduced Nietzsche to the English-speaking world. It is too fantastic, too ill-balanced, to serve as a dignified polemic, or yet as a corrective. In Germany it but strengthened Wagner’s cause. Yet its occasional meteoric lucidity, its wit, its blows with a hammer, are at times extremely diverting. The last of his writings, it should be read the last. We say the last, for his Transvaluation of All Values—the first part of which is Antichrist, need not concern us here—was begun when the author was struck down. After Wagner, Bizet; after Parsifal, Carmen; for he swore that Bizet was the greater, Bizet the creator of La Gaya Scienza. Nietzsche had to swing to the other extreme musically after his secession from Wagnerism. But Bizet——!

The Nietzsche philosophical pedigree is not difficult to trace. He comes intellectually from Max Stirner—especially Stirner—Bakounine, the anarchist, and Karl Gutzkow. As mad a Schopenhauerian as Richard Wagner, he threw over his allegiance to the Master Pessimist when he discovered that there can be no will to live without previous existence, and existence presupposes will. It is the Will to Power that is Nietzsche’s cardinal doctrine, and this will to power is neither evil nor good, for our Siegfried among philosophers would transvalue all moral values. In his divagations with a hammer—he called himself the Philosopher with a Hammer—smashed all idols, old, new, and to come. He likewise, in his intellectual fury and craving after universal knowledge, smashed the exceeding delicate mechanism of his own brain. Boasting of Polish blood, he, like Poland, represented a disintegrated individualism. Nietzsky was said to be the ancestral name, and with it was inherited all the pride of his nationality. He loathed the common herd more than Horace, more than Flaubert—to whom life was but a bad smell. Herbert Spencer’s philosophical moderation, the tepid piety of the middle classes, he equally scorned. He would have us all aristocrats in mind and body, and Wagner’s snobbery—so necessary to his worldly advancement—filled Nietzsche with disgust. No king, no pope, no democracy, could bind his rebellious intellect. Like Ibsen’s Brand he sought ever the steepest heights. A lonely soul is Zarathustra—Nietzsche, and one of the most saddening scenes in Also sprach Zarathustra (begun in 1883, finished in 1885, but not published until 1892) is his finding of the animals, the pope and Wagner worshipping the Jackass according to the ritual of the Roman Catholic church. It was Wagner’s Parsifal that stung him to madness. The anti-naturalism, the mysticism, the attempted revival in theatric form of—to him—hierarchical superstitions and various abnormalities, shocked the soul of Nietzsche. In his wonderful prose epic, Wagner appears masked as the Wizard, the prophet of pity, of redemption of all the formulas hated by this extraordinary thinker.

It is mere childishness, or else bigotry, to point at Nietzsche’s end as the moral tag of his life. If he had lived during the Middle Ages, either he would have been burnt alive or else have proved a formidable rival to some angelic doctor. But living in the nineteenth century, a century of indifference to men of his ardent temperament, he erected his own stake and fagots and the mad genius within him burnt up his mind. While he would not have so astonished the world if born to work in the dogmatic harness of the Roman Catholic church, yet its discipline might have quieted his throbbing nerves, and perhaps given the faith a second Rosmini.

A magnificent dialectician, Nietzsche threw overboard all metaphysical baggage. He despised the jargon of Schoolman and modern philosophers. For him Hegel was a verbalistic bat, blind to the realities of life; and it is just at this point that the influence of the insurgent has been so provocative of good. He has overturned the barriers of a repulsive metaphysical terminology and dared to be naked and natural, though a philosopher. He erected no system, no vast, polyphonic edifice with winding staircase and darkened chambers. Nietzsche made no philosophical formula; rather, his formula is an image, the image of a lithe dancer. The writer of this résumé pretends to see the beginnings of Nietzsche’s philosophy, or poetry, in the second part of Faust. When Euphorion, that child of Helena and Faust, of Beauty and Intellect, the merging of the Classical and Romantic, sings:—

Let me be skipping,

Let me be leaping,

To soar and circle

Through ether sweeping,

Is now the passion

That me hath won,

he but set the pace for Nietzsche, the Dancing Philosopher. Dancing blithely over a tight rope stretched between two eternities, the Past and the Future, Man, gay, and unafraid, views the depths of Time and Space. It is “Man who is a rope connecting animal and Beyond Man” (Übermensch). “He is a bridge, not a goal; a transition and a destruction.” These seemingly startling statements, which may be found in Thus spake Zarathustra, are, after all, nothing new; Christianity, with its angels and Darwinism, with its bold hints at future evolutions and developments, do but say the same things, each in its own way. But Nietzsche, like his beloved Euphorion, must needs graze the rim of the sun in his flight, and Icarus-wise come tumbling to earth—and a Weimar retreat.

The Titanism of Nietzsche, might over right, power over weakness, impels him to hate all weakness, and Christianity, he declares, is a weakness, a degenerate sort of Judaism, complicated with the teachings of Greek mystagogues. He says that the first and only Christian was nailed to the cross, and this should please the heart of Tolstoy. Bolder still is Nietzsche’s wish that a Dostoïevsky might have depicted the Christ in all his childlike innocence and Godlike love. Nietzsche worships force and hates slave-morality, i.e. all modern religions, in which pity for the weak is basic. To him the symbol of the crucifix is degrading, a symbol of degenerating races. A very Spartan, he would have the great blond barbarian once more trample, Attila-like, the blood-stained soil of Europe and Asia, sparing none. Væ Victis! “What is best belongeth to my folk and myself. And if it is not given to us, we take it, the best food, the purest sky, the strongest thoughts, the most beautiful women.” Thus spake Zarathustra, and the voice is Nietzsche’s, but the hands are the hands of Esau—Bismarck: Blood and Iron!

It is in Also sprach Zarathustra that the genius of Nietzsche is best studied. Like the Buddhistic Tripitaka, it is a book of highly colored Oriental aphorisms, interrupted by lofty lyric outbursts. It is an ironic, enigmatic rhetorical rhapsody, the Third Part of a half-mad Faust. In it may be seen flowing all the currents of modern cultures and philosophies, and if it teaches anything at all, it teaches the wisdom and beauty of air, sky, waters, and earth, and of laughter, not Pantagruelian, but “holy laughter.” The love of earth is preached in rapturous accents. A Dionysian ecstasy anoints the lips of this latter-day Sibyl on his tripod, when he speaks of earth. He is intoxicated with the fulness of its joys. No gloomy monasticism, no denial of the will to live, no futile thinking about thinking,—so despised by Goethe,—no denial of grand realities, may be found in the curriculum of this Bacchantic philosopher. A Pantheist, he is also a poet and seer like William Blake, and marvels at the symbol of nature, “the living garment of the Deity”—Nietzsche’s deity, of course. It is this realistic, working philosophy—if philosophy it be in the academic sense—that has endeared Nietzsche to the newer generation, that has set his triumphant standard on the very threshold of the new century. After the metaphysical cobweb spinners, the Hegels, Fichtes, Schellings, after the dreary pessimism of the soured Schopenhauer,—whose pessimism was temperamental, as is all pessimism, so James Sully has pointed out,—after many negations and stumblings, the vigorous affirmations of this Nihilist are stimulating, suggestive, refreshing, especially in Germany, the stronghold of philosophical and sentimental Philistinism. Not reward, but the sheer delight of living, of conquering self, of winning victories in the teeth of defeat,—thus spake the wisdom of Nietzsche.

For English-speaking readers the many attacks on Nietzsche have placed the philosopher under the cloud of a peculiar misconception. Viciously arguing that a man in a madhouse could only produce a mad philosophy, his assailants forgot that it was Nietzsche’s very intensity of mental vision, his phenomenal faculty of attention, his hopeless attempt to square the circle of things human, that brought about his sad plight. If he had not thought so madly, so strenuously, if he had put to slumber his irritable conscience, his insatiable curiosity, with current anodynes, Nietzsche might have been alive to-day.

In Also sprach Zarathustra he consciously or unconsciously vied with Goethe in Faust; with Wagner’s Ring, with Balzac’s Comédie Humaine, with Ibsen’s Brand, with Tolstoy’s War and Peace, with Senancour’s Oberman, with Browning’s Paracelsus. It is the history of his soul, as Leaves of Grass is Whitman’s—there are some curious parallelisms between these two subjective epics. It is intimate, yet hints at universality; it contains some of Amiel’s introspection and some of Baudelaire’s morbidity; half mad, yet exhorting, comforting; Hamlet and John Bunyan.

Nietzsche then is a critical mode of viewing the universe, rather than creator of a formal philosophy. He has set his imprint on all European culture, from the dream novels of that Italian of the Renaissance, the new Cellini, Gabriele d’Annunzio, to the Pole Przybyszewski, who has transformed Nietzsche into a very Typhoon of emotion. The musician Heinrich Pudor has imitated the master in his attacks on modern music; while Gerhart Hauptmann, Richard Dehmel—all young Germany, young France, has patterned after the great Immoralist, as he chose to call himself. Among the composers affected by him we find Richard Strauss, not attempting to set the philosophy of Nietzsche to music—as many wrongfully suppose—but arranging, as in a huge phantasmagoria, the emotions excited by the close study of Thus spake Zarathustra. And a many-colored piece of music it is, full of frowning mountains, fragrant meads, and barren, ugly, waste places.

Nietzsche met the fate of all rebels from Lucifer to Byron—neglect and obloquy. With something of Heraclitus, of Democritus, of Bruno Giordano, of Luther in him, there was allied a sensitivity almost Chopin’s. The combination is a poor one for practical purposes; so the brain died before the body,—humanity cannot transcend itself. Notwithstanding all his contradictions, limitations, cloudland rhapsodies, aversion from the banal, despite his futile flights into the Inane, his word-weaving, his impossible premisses and mad conclusions, the thunder-march of his ideas, the brilliancy and polish of his style—the greatest German prose since Schopenhauer’s—have insured Nietzsche immortality; as immortality goes among world thinkers: fifty years of quotation and then—the biographical dictionaries.

Friedrich Nietzsche is, as Havelock Ellis declares, “a great aboriginal force”; perhaps, with Max Stirner, the greatest in the last half of the nineteenth century. And that same Stirner is the true stock from which Nietzsche sprang—Stirner who dared to say, “My truth is the truth.”

Nietzsche died August 28, 1900, literally the Morgenröthe of the new century. It was at Weimar, once the home of Goethe and Liszt. Nietzsche was in an insane asylum from 1888. Dr. Hermann Turck asserts that his work was done during a comparatively sane interval between two incarcerations. In 1868 he met Richard Wagner, and under the spell of his synthetic genius he wrote Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geist der Musik, and dedicated it to Wagner, his “sublime forerunner.” Every line of it, he declares in the preface, was “conceived in close communion with Wagner.” And let those who know only the later Nietzsche casually read this essay to be convinced of its sanity, its acuity, its penetrating originality. Here we find the enthusiastic, impetuous youth, fresh from his Grecian studies, a valiant champion of Hellenistic culture, an opponent of the orientalization of modern life and thought. Twelve years later he discovered in Parsifal this very despised orientalization, and did not hesitate to say so in The Wagner Case, that fatal illustration of George Moore’s pithy axiom: When we change our opinions we change our friends.

The man who marshalled in the most deadly array of attack his arguments against Wagnerism is also the man who wrote the most brilliant book of all on Wagner. Richard Wagner in Bayreuth is a masterpiece of critical rhapsody. The sister who nursed the sick-brained man for twelve years, Frau Friedrich Förster-Nietzsche, tells the story of the dissensions in this friendship, a friendship that could have endured only through a miracle. Both men had “nerves” in a highly irritable condition; and, while Wagner had weathered the storm and had, perforce, developed a stout integument of disdain, Nietzsche had always remained the sensitive, morbid, cloistered student. There is no doubt that Richard Wagner, at the triumphant culmination of his life-work, was an arrogant, exacting, and jealous being. Wahnfried was, as it now is, a Star Chamber, where the Vehmgericht judged swiftly, fiercely. Here is one story told by the sister and quoted by H. E. Krehbiel in his too brief review of the episode:—

My brother and I heard the Triumphlied of Brahms in the Bâle Cathedral. It was a splendid performance and pleased Fritz very much. When he went to Bayreuth in August, he took the pianoforte arrangement with him, apparently in the naïve belief that Wagner would like it. I say “apparently,” for upon later reflection it has occurred to me that this red-bound Triumphlied was meant as a sort of goad, and therefore Wagner’s prodigious wrath seems to have been not altogether groundless. So I will leave the continuation of the tale to Wagner, who had an exquisite fashion of satirizing himself:—

“Your brother set this red book on the piano; whenever I went into the drawing-room, the red thing stared me in the face; it exasperated me, as a red rag to a bull. Perhaps I guessed that Nietzsche wanted it to say to me, ‘See here another man who can turn out something good!’ and one evening I broke out with a vengeance.”

Wagner had a hearty laugh at the recollection. “What did my brother say?” I asked in alarm. “Nothing at all,” answered Wagner. “He simply blushed, and looked at me in astonishment and modest dignity. I would give a hundred thousand marks to have such splendid manners as this Nietzsche, always distinguished, always well bred; it’s an immense advantage in the world.” That story of Wagner’s came back to my mind at this time (spring of 1875). “Fritz,” I said, “why didn’t you tell me that tale about Brahms’s Triumphlied? Wagner related the whole thing to me himself.” Fritz looked straight before him and held his tongue. At last he said, beneath his breath, “Lisbeth, then Wagner was not great.”

Another time Wagner interfered with a walking tour that Nietzsche had planned to take with the son of Felix Mendelssohn, a professor at Freiburg. The young philosopher winced, but gave in to the elder man’s request. His commonplace book reveals his secret irritation. Here is a specimen of his early revolt from the banner of Bayreuth:—

How infinitely purer is the soul of a Bach or a Beethoven in comparison with the soul of a Wagner. In the same sense as Goethe was a painter strayed from his true vocation, and Schiller an orator, Wagner is an actor manqué....

Who are the men who swell the ranks of his partisans? Singers who wish to appear more interesting by acting their parts as well as singing them to produce the maximum of effect with a minimum of voice; composers who hoodwink the public by a sort of glamour into a non-critical attitude; audiences who are bored by the old masters and find in Wagner a stimulant for their jaded nerves.

Yet earlier he had written in such an eloquent strain as this:—

Wagner is never more Wagner than when his difficulties increase tenfold, and he triumphs over them with all the legislative zeal of a victorious ruler, subduing rebellious elements, reducing them to simple rhythms, and imprinting the supreme power of his will on a vast multitude of contending emotions.... It can be said of him that he has endowed everything in nature with a language. He believed that nothing need be dumb. He cast his plummet into the mystery of sunrise, forest and mountain, mist and night shadows, and learned that all these cherished intense longing for a voice.

Houston Chamberlain believes that when the panegyrics and attacks upon Wagner have been consigned to that eternal limbo, the dust-heap, Nietzsche’s Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, will still survive. Perhaps back of the wounded vanity was the usual feeling that in Bayreuth and Wagner his last illusion had vanished; madness was coming on apace. Even his sister admits that he held aloof during the rejoicing and festivities of 1876, and Wagner’s Gemüthlichkeit expressed in exuberant spirits (probably he stood on his head more than once in those gay times; it was a trick of his, as Praeger relates,—his punning, his advice to his shy, shrinking disciple to get him a wife, useless advice to this ardent upholder of ideal friendship), and all these things told on his nerves. He went away, and later in his Menschliches Allzumenschliches appeared the first faint thread that, in Der Fall Wagner, had become a scarlet skein of abuse. He depreciated genius as being “a product of atavism, its glory is cheap, its throne quickly reared, and bending the knee to it is a mere habit.” Wahnfried, quick to detect heresy, recognized the allusion; and Wagner, deeply pained at the defection of a real friend, forbade his name to be mentioned. And Wagner was, as Nietzsche declared, the grande passion of his life.

M. Schuré thus described the personal appearances of Nietzsche:—

No one who conversed with him could fail to be struck by the powers of his mind, and the singularity of his looks. His closely cropped hair and heavy mustache gave him at first sight the air of a cavalry officer. There was combination of hauteur and timidity in his bearing. His voice, musical and deliberate, betrayed the artistic temperament; his meditative almost hesitating gait, the philosopher. Nothing was more deceptive than the apparent calm of his expression. He had the fixed eye of the thinker, but at the same time it was the eye of the searching and keen observer and the fanatical visionary. This dual character of the eye was almost uncanny, and had a disquieting effect on those who talked with him face to face. His expression in moments of enthusiasm could be one of dreamy sweetness, but almost instantly relapsed again into fierce hostility.... There was a distant, isolated atmosphere about the whole Nietzsche personality, a veiled disdain which is often characteristic of the aristocrat of thought.

In a brief tribute to the memory of Friedrich Nietzsche, “So solltet ihr Nietzsche verstehen,” in the Beilage zur Allgemeinen Zeitung, Frau Professor Wanda Bartels tells of her and her husband’s chance acquaintance with the famous thinker during a sojourn in Venice. She dwells upon the contrast of his own modest reserve and unassuming ways with those of the blustering youths who flaunt in public as his followers and believers in his “system”; for he had no system, and “did not write to teach the immature, but to free his own soul.” Frau Bartels’s protest calls to mind the more weighty and truly enlightening utterances of another personal friend of Nietzsche, Professor Paul Deussen, of Kiel, who, writing in the Wiener Rundschau on the Truth about Friedrich Nietzsche, discusses with great clearness the two cardinal points of Nietzsche’s doctrine, viz. the Übermensch and the ewige Wiederkehr, or eternal repetition of the world process. The former, Professor Deussen holds, is an ideal of humanity which, in essential points, coincides with the Christ of the church; and when Nietzsche insists that the man within us must be overcome in order that the Übermensch may arise, he preaches what all great moralists and religious teachers have preached. Nietzsche errs in his conception of the nature of the “negation of the will,” and in substituting genius for morality (or the intellect for the will) as the means of attaining to an ideal humanity.

After many years of guessing in the dark as to Nietzsche’s madness, Dr. George M. Gould points out in a careful and convincing essay that the original trouble began with his eyes, with a faulty diagnosis of his complaint. Dr. Gould writes, after sifting all the evidence of Nietzsche’s day-books and his sister’s suspicions as to the real cause, in the Montreal Medical Journal:—

I have spoken of the physiologic cause of this morbidly feverish intensity of mental activity. It appears to me the inevitable irritation due to severe eye-strain. Nietzsche also thought of suicide. Nietzsche produced within twenty years sixteen volumes, all written by himself in small, clear handwriting, all the result of independent philosophic and original thinking, besides several other volumes of technical philologic studies. He was, moreover, a busy, conscientious teacher and lecturer.

The influence of his disease upon his character and writings is everywhere painfully manifest. Nietzsche was seized with an enthusiasm for Schopenhauer and his works at the age of twenty-one. With greater intensity his devotion to Wagner and his music, I gather, was turned to morbid dislike by the influence of diseased cerebral activity. Deussen, I feel, is in error when he writes that “A deeper cause lay at the root of Nietzsche’s resignation of his professorship in 1879 than his ‘combined diseases of the nerves of his eyes, brain, and stomach.’ The philologic profession of teachers, like a coat, became too small for him, etc. His internal unrest, etc.”

But if so, it is an error which only extends the pathologic to the deeper activities of his mind. How far his cerebral irritation was responsible for his “aristocratic anarchy,” his occasional lapses into egoistic disdain, etc., would be impossible to gauge. It surely was not wholly inoperative. Stringency, hardness, radicalism, it certainly helped to produce. Möbius thinks the Zarathustra would not have been written without the morbid cerebral irritation. It appears almost certain that the aphoristic form of much of his later writing is explained as the result of the manner in which he was forced to do his literary work, i.e. by thinking and note-making while walking. The serious reflexes to eyes, head, and digestive system, which were induced by writing, compelled him to collate these notes with the least overworking possible. Hence also result the growing contradictions and illogicalities, the discreteness and want of transitional, connecting, and modifying sentences.

In one of the last days of December, 1888, or in the first days of January (dates not definite), Nietzsche fell, near his lodgings in Turin, and could not rise again. A servant found him and led him home with much difficulty. For two days he lay silent and still on his sofa, when abnormal cerebral activity and confusion were evident. He spoke much in monologue, sang and played the piano loud and long, lost the sense of money value, and wrote fantastically to and about his friends, etc. Overbeck hurried to him and brought him to Basle, to the sanatorium of Professor Binswanger, the alienist, where the diagnosis, according to Deussen, of progressive, later corrected to that of atypical, paralysis, was made. His mother had him brought to Naumburg, cared for him until her death in 1897, after which his sister moved with him to Weimar. He died August 25, 1900.

According to Dr. Reicholdt the immediate cause of his death was pneumonia, with edema of the lungs. There was no autopsy; an examination of the brain would have revealed many secrets.

Is it not an unusual coincidence that Bayreuth, the very hub of Wagner’s musical and of Nietzsche’s intellectual activities, is also the birthplace of a man who is one of Nietzsche’s forerunners, one is tempted to say, his real philosophical progenitor? In the thriving Bavarian village was born, October 25, 1806, Caspar Schmidt, later known to the world as Max Stirner, the author of The Individual and his Property (Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum, Leipsic, 1845), the very gospel of modern philosophical anarchy, and a book which, with Guyau’s system of morals, paved the way for Nietzsche. Stirner, poor, unknown, died in Berlin, June 26, 1856. There is a sympathetic study of his life by John Henry Mackay, the German poet with Scotch blood in his veins.

The best single study in the English language on Nietzsche is by Havelock Ellis. This writer hazards the just observation that there was a touch of the “prig” in the philosopher, and that Wagner’s free and easy manners often made him wince. “Your brother with his air of delicate distinction is a most uncomfortable fellow,” Wagner said to Frau Förster-Nietzsche, “one can always see what he is thinking; sometimes he is quite embarrassed at my jokes—and then I crack them more madly than ever.” And the motley crowd that was attracted to Bayreuth filled the exclusive Nietzsche with horror. An aristocrat, a promulgator of an aristocratic philosophy, writers on social science very properly refuse to class this thinker among the leaders of the anarchistic movement—Nietzsche loathed the promiscuous, the popular, in a word, the mob. Wagner was Teutonic (his friend doubted his Teutonism in a memorable passage); he was no longer Hellenic. And he seemed to be going Romeward. It was all too much for the idealist who broke away from his past; in reality, the attempt was made to break with himself. Impending madness was preceded by distressing melancholia.

He loved Wagner to the last, and previous to the tragic crisis, Lou Salomé says that he went to Lucerne, and in Triebschen sat and wept at his ineluctable fate. He even wrote after The Wagner Case such a sentiment as this:—

“Here, while I am speaking of the recreations of my life, I lack the word to express my gratitude for that which formed my deepest and my heartiest solace. This beyond all doubt was the intimate communion with Richard Wagner. I would give little for the rest of my human relations; at no price would I cut out of my life the days of Triebschen, days of trust, of cheerfulness, of sublime inspirations, of deep moments. I know not what others have gone through with Wagner; our heaven was never traversed by a cloud.”

Was Wagner to blame? Wagner, harassed by a thousand importunings—his gigantic Bayreuth scheme, his money troubles, his uncertain position despite his first big success! Ellis believes, rightly enough, that when Wagner realized Nietzsche was no longer his friend, “he dropped him silently, as a workman drops a useless tool.” This seems cruelly selfish; but Wagner had no time for unselfish moods, for fine-spun theories of friendship. He was a realist. Life had made him one; besides, was there not Ludwig of Bavaria to take the place of the once gentle dreamer, now doubter and scorner? And Wagner was old enough to recognize the value of money. No, the great composer is not to be alone censured. Yet must we exclaim, Alas! poor Nietzsche!

II

What does Nietzsche preach? What is his central doctrine divested of its increments of anti-Semitism, anti-Wagnerism, anti-Christianity, and anti-everything else? Simply, a doctrine as old as the first invertebrate organism which floated in torrid seas beneath a blazing moon: Egoism, individualism, personal freedom, selfhood. He is the apostle of the ego, and he refuses to accept the system spinning of the Teutonic spider philosophers of the day. He is a proclaimer of the rank animalism of man. He believes in the body and not in the soul of theology.

From Heraclitus to Hobbes materialism has flowed, a sturdy current, parallel with hundreds of more spiritual creeds. I say “more spiritual creeds,” for the spiritualizing of what was once contemptuously called dead, inorganic matter is being steadily prosecuted by every man of science to-day, whether he be electrician, biologist, or chemist. Nietzsche’s voice is raised against the mystagogues, occultists, and reactionaries who, in the name of religion and art, would put science once more under the ban of a century ago. He is the strong pagan man who hates the weak and ailing. He therefore hates the religion of the weak and oppressed. He is an aristocrat in art, believing that there should be an art for artists, and an art—an inferior art—for inferior intelligences. He forgot that there is an art for the artist,—his own particular art, and that into it none but the equally gifted may have an entrance. And he forgot, too, that all great art is rooted in the soil of earth.

Nietzsche hates the music that is beloved of the world. Yet, after the twentieth hearing of Carmen, he frantically asserts that Bizet is a greater man than Wagner, that he is blither, possesses the divine gayety, sparkle, and indescribable fascination of the Greeks! From his letters we learn that as a joke he put up Bizet as a man of straw to fight the Wagner idol. And a joke it is. But what would he have said to the music of Richard Strauss?

He rejects with contempt pity,—that pity which is akin to love; and therefore he hates Wagner, for in Wagner’s music is the note of yearning love and pity sounded by a master hand. To Nietzsche George Eliot’s

Oh may I join the choir invisible

Of those immortal dead who live again

In minds made better by their presence: live

In pulses stirred to generosity,

... in scorn

For miserable aims that end with self

would have been as silly as was the optimism of Leibnitz to Schopenhauer. This Nietzsche was a terrible fellow, a very Berserker in his mad rage against existing institutions. He used a battering ram of rare dialectic skill, and crash go the religious, social, and artistic fabrics reared ages since! But when the brilliant smoke of his style clears away, we still see standing the same venerable institutions. This tornadic philosopher does damage only to the outlying structures. He lets in light on some dark and dank places. He is a tonic for malaria, musical and religious; and there is value even in his own fantastic Transvaluation of all Values. I fancy that if Friedrich Nietzsche had been a man of physical resources, he would have been a soldier hero. The late Anton Seidl once told me that he knew the unlucky man when he was a Wagnerian. He was slight of stature, evidently of delicate health, but in his eyes burned the restless fire of genius. If that same energy could have been transmuted into action, he might have been a sane, healthy man to-day. In all this he was not unlike Stendhal, of whom Jules Lemaître wrote:—

“A grand man of action, paralyzed little by little by his incomparable analysis.” Nietzsche burned his brain away by a too strenuous analysis of life.

I can recommend to all Wagnerites Nietzsche’s Der Fall Wagner. It is bound to take the edge off their uncritical worship. But read it after the first study, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. It will also demonstrate that Wagner is great, and Wagnerism dangerous. Nietzsche saw with clear eyes the peril that threatens music because of the Wagnerian principles. We must never lose sight of the fact that with Wagner the drama almost always takes precedence. His deviation from his own theory was his artistic salvation. But there lies the danger in him for young composers. He is a man of the theatre. His music, divested of all the metaphysical verbiage heaped upon it by Wagner and Wagnerian critics, is music of the footlights. A great formalist he is; but it is Wagner’s form, not the form for orchestral writers. It is all well enough to say that the symphony has had its day; but its structure, despite numberless modifications, will survive as long as absolute music itself. And music pure and simple, for itself, undefiled by costumes, scenery, limelights, and vocal virtuosi, is the noblest music of all.

Nietzsche writes of Germany as “being arbitrarily stupefied by itself for nearly a thousand years.”

“Nowhere have the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, been more wickedly misused. Recently a third has been introduced, with which alone every refined and bold activity of intellect can be wiped out—music, our sluggish, ever more sluggish, German music. How much moody heaviness, lameness, humidity, and dressing-gown mood, how much beer is in German intelligence!” You may readily understand that this Nietzsche is a Slav. He is agile of temperament, his mind is a supple one; he loves the keen rapier thrusts, the glancing thrust of the Celt. He hates Germany. Was he a German? He is wholly Slavic at times, and yet what a contradictory man and how naïve his egotism! More feminine altogether than masculine was this febrile, capricious mind, and a hater of the Teuton, a race that is at once both fat and nervous.

Nietzsche is par excellence the thinker for the artistic. If Wagner was a painter, or a symphonist manqué, then Nietzsche was an artist manqué. His prose, swift, weighty, concentrated and brilliant, attracts readers who dislike his doctrines. One must read what he says in his Roving Expeditions of an Inopportune Philosopher.

“Seneca, or the toreador of virtue.”

“Rousseau, or return to nature in impuris naturalibus.”

“Schiller, or the moral Trumpeter of Säckingen.”

“Dante, or the hyena poetising in tombs.”

“Kant, or cant, as an intelligent character.”

“Victor Hugo, or Pharos, in a sea of absurdity.”

“Michelet, or enthusiasm which strips off the coat.”

“Carlyle, or pessimism as an undigested dinner.”

“John Stuart Mill, or offensive transparency.”

“The Goncourts, or the two Ajaxes struggling with Homer; music by Offenbach.”

Nietzsche preached of the beauty and pride of the body. Of pride we cannot have too much. It is the salt of personality. Golden-mouthed Plato, in De Republica, makes outcry against the dullard who thinks shame of his body. The human body is truly a tabernacle, and woe to him that defileth it, says the wise man.

He once made a proposal to found a monastery for freethinkers. What an abbot he would have been!

Did Nietzsche not declare, in the words of the Apostle Matthew (xvi. 26), slightly altered:—

“For what is a man profited if he shall gain his own soul and lose the whole world?”

Consider his great opponent, Tolstoy, who preaches the doctrine of non-resistance, of altruism, of a depressing socialism which is saturated with the very Orientalism so despised by Nietzsche! But then, Tolstoy does not play fair in the game. He has reached the threescore and ten of Scriptures; he has led, by his own acknowledgment, a life of self-indulgence; he has gambled and drank deeply. His belly was his god. Then he ran the intellectual gamut of dissipation. He worshipped at the shrines of false gods, wrote great, gray, godless novels, won renown, family happiness, riches, love, admiration, applause, and notoriety. So, having lived too happily, he forthwith falls to railing at destiny, like the Englishman Mr. Krehbiel tells us of in his Music and Manners. Quoting Haydn he writes, “Mr. Brassey once cursed because he enjoyed too much happiness in this world.” Tolstoy, having tasted of everything, has damaged his palate. Man pleases him not, nor does woman. In every book of his later, lonesome years he gives away the secret of life’s illusion, like the mischievous rival of a conjuror. It is not fair to the young ones who, with mouth agape, gaze at the cunning pictures limned by that old arch-hypocrite, Nature. The young man who has not had the courage to make a fool of himself some time in his career has not lived. Robert Louis Stevenson said this, and he said it better. Away with your cynics! Throw pessimism to the dogs! Let Tolstoy swear that the inverted bowl of the firmament is full of ashes, full of burnt-out stars; youth will see the bravery of the cosmical circus, its streamers, its mad coursing through eternity. The only way to help others is to help yourself!

So, despite his age, which is democratic, the aristocrat Nietzsche caught its ears; in the teeth of a religious reaction he preached rank atheism; and he opposed to altruism a selfless egotism. In a word, all his tendencies were set against those of his time; yet he has succeeded in attracting the attention of his contemporaries. Brandes is right in declaring that in some secret way Nietzsche “must have agreed with much of the tumult of modern thought.”

In his Gay Science,—a mockingly ironic title for such a sad book,—Nietzsche wrote these sentences; as in a meteoric flare we realize the sickness of his prophetic soul. He alludes to his idea of Eternal Recurrence:—

How were it if, some day or night, a demon stole after thee into thy most solitary solitude, and said to thee: “This life, as thou livest it now, and hast lived it, thou shalt have to live over again, and not once but innumerable times; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every pleasure, and every thought and sigh, and everything in thy life, the great and the unspeakably petty alike, must come again to thee, and all in the same series and succession; this spider, too, and this moonlight betwixt the trees, and this moment likewise and I myself. The eternal sand-glass of time is always turned again, and thou with it, thou atom of dust.” Wouldest thou not cast thyself down, and with gnashing of teeth curse the demon who thus spoke? Or hast thou ever experienced the tremendous moment in which thou wouldest answer him, “Thou art a god, and never heard I anything more divine”?

Frau Andreas-Salomé, whose book on the philosopher is interesting, though disclaimed by Frau Förster-Nietzsche, adds this illuminating commentary on Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence doctrine:—

He struggled with it at first as with a fate from which there was no escape. Never can I forget the hours in which he first confided it to me as a secret, as something of whose verification and confirmation he had an unspeakable horror; he spoke of it only in a low voice and with every sign of the profoundest horror. And he suffered in truth so deeply in life that the certainty of life’s eternal recurrence could not but be for him a thing to shudder at. The quintessence of the doctrine of recurrence, the radiant apotheosis of life which Nietzsche afterwards taught, forms so profound a contrast to his own painful experiences of life that it impresses us as an uncanny mask.

And she further remarks: “Nietzsche contemplated the possibility that the theory might be scientifically deduced by physics from the doctrine of atoms.” And here we are almost back to the orthodox belief in eternity. All thought moves circle-wise, and Nietzsche’s ethical teaching is as old as Callicles in the Gorgias.

Nietzsche, then, is not such a revolutionary thinker. He is the perfect type of the old Greek rhapsodist, the impassioned rhetor, who with sonorous, beautiful phrases charmed and soothed his listeners as he pursued his peripatetic way. Sometimes the sound of what he says remains long after the memory of its sense has vanished. However, a perfect art or philosophy, or a perfect world itself, might soon grow monotonous. The ameliorating, if slightly hedonistic, philosophy of the Cardinal in John Inglesant comes back in pleasing sequence:—

There is no solution; believe me, no solution of life’s enigma worth the reading.... What solution can you hope to find, brooding on your own heart, on this narrow plot of grass shut in by lofty walls? You, and natures like yours, make this great error; you are moralizing and speculating upon what life ought to be, and in the meantime it slips by you, and you are nothing, and life is gone. I have heard, you doubtless, in a fine concert of viols extemporary descant upon a thorough-bass in the Italian manner, when each performer in turn plays such a variety of descant, in concordance to the bass, as his skill and the present invention may suggest to him. In this manner of play the consonances invariably fall true upon a given note, and every succeeding note of the ground is met, now in the unison or octave, now in the concords, preserving the melody throughout by the laws of motion and sound. I have thought that this is life.

To a solemn bass of mystery and of the unseen each man plays his own descant, as his taste or fate suggests; but this manner of play is so governed and controlled by what seems a fatal necessity that all melts into a species of harmony; and even the very discords and dissonances, the wild passions and deeds of men, are so attempered and adjusted that without them the entire piece would be incomplete. In this way I look upon life as a spectacle.

IV
LITERARY MEN WHO LOVED MUSIC

THE MUSICAL TASTE OF TURGÉNIEFF

I

Mr. Henry James, who is exquisitely aware of the presence of others, has written of Iván Turgénieff with astonishing candor. In his Partial Portraits a picture of the great, gentle Russian writer is slowly built up by strokes like smoke. There is much of his troubled melancholy, some of his humor, and, rare for Mr. James, distinct allusions to Turgénieff’s attitude in the presence of the American-born novelist’s work. Turgénieff cared little for criticism. It pleased him to know that his friends loved him and read his books. He did not read theirs; Mr. James admits he did not pretend to read his, though the older man confessed to having found one of the novels written de main de maitre. His heedlessness about himself and his affairs is proverbial. He was robbed of 130,000 francs, “a fairly large slice of his fortune,” he writes Flaubert, but has blame for himself, not for the dishonest steward of his estates. Like Flaubert, he was rich, very rich for a literary man, and like the author of Bouvard et Pécuchet, he was continually giving, eternally giving, said his Paris friends, indignant at the spectacle of both men denuding themselves of more than their surplus income.

There is no one alive who could give us such intimate souvenirs of Turgénieff as Madame Viardot-Garcia. He was the family friend, the closest companion, of her husband; it was an undisturbed intimacy for many years. His letters, the most eloquent, were written to Madame Viardot-Garcia, and to both he opened his mind about music. He knew Gounod, who often visited him and rolled about on his bearskin rug when he was in the travail of composition. It was at Courtavenel, the country place of the Viardots, that Gounod met Turgénieff. Their liking was mutual.

Turgénieff knew the piano slightly, for he writes of his having played duos of Beethoven and Mozart with a sister of Tolstoy. He counsels, in a letter from Spasskoïé, Madame Viardot to work at her composition. This gifted woman, singer, and pianist, admired by Liszt, Heine, and half of Europe, occasionally found time to compose. “And now set to work!” cries Turgénieff. “I have never admired and preached work so much as I have since I have been doing nothing myself; and yet look here, I give you my word of honor, that, if you will begin to write sonatas, I will take up my literary work again. ‘Hand me the cinnamon and I’ll hand you the senna.’ A novel for a sonata—does that suit you?”

In an earlier letter he speaks of Russia “with its vast and sombre countenance, motionless and veiled like the sphinx of Œdipus. She will swallow me up later on. I seem to see her large, inert gaze fixed upon me, with its dreary scrutiny appropriate to eyes of stone. Never mind, sphinx, I shall return to thee; and thou mayest devour me at thine ease, if I do not guess thy riddle! Meanwhile, leave me in peace a little longer; I shall return to thy steppes.” All his life passionately preoccupied with Russia, Turgénieff had the bitter misfortune of being discredited by his countrymen. Never a bard and prophet like Tolstoy, he nevertheless loved Russia and saw her weaknesses with as keen an eye as the other writer. Accused of an ultra-cosmopolitanism, wofully misunderstood, this great man went to his grave sorrowing because young Russia, the extreme left, refused him. If he was solicitous in advancing the names of Flaubert, Daudet, the de Goncourts, Zola, and de Maupassant, his zeal for rising talent in his native land led him to extremes. Halperine-Kaminsky and Mr. James say that he had always in tow some wonderful Russian genius, poet, painter, musician, sculptor, or nondescript, who was about to revolutionize art. In a month he was hot on the trail of a new one, and his pains were usually rewarded by ineptitude or ingratitude. To paint him as an indifferent patriot, an “absentee” landlord,—his behavior to his tenants was ridiculously tender,—is an injustice, as unjust as the reception given Tschaïkowsky at the beginning of his career by certain of his contemporaries.

The friendship of Turgénieff and Flaubert was a beautiful episode in the history of two literatures. Alphonse Daudet spoke of it: “It was George Sand who married them. The boastful, rebellious, quixotic Flaubert, with a voice like a guard’s trumpeter, with his penetrating, ironical outlook, and the gait of a conquering Norman, was undoubtedly the masculine half of this marriage of souls; but who, in that other colossal being, with his flaxen brows, his great unmodelled face, would have discovered the woman, that woman of over-accentuated refinement whom Turgénieff has painted in his books, that nervous, languid, passionate Russian, torpid as an Oriental, tragic as a blind force in revolt? So true is it in the tumult of the great human factory, souls often get into the wrong covering—masculine souls into feminine bodies, feminine souls into cyclopean frames.”

These were the days of the “Dinners of the Hissed Authors,” when Taine, Catulle Mendès, de Heredia, Paul Alexis, Leon Hennique, Philippe Burty, Leon Cladel, Huysmans, Zola, Turgénieff, the de Goncourts, Flaubert, and de Maupassant gathered monthly and defined new literary horizons. There was plenty of wit, satire, enthusiasm, dreams, and theorizing.

Guy de Maupassant relates that “Turgénieff used to bury himself in an arm chair and talk slowly in a gentle voice, rather weak and hesitating, yet giving to things he said an extraordinary charm and interest. Flaubert would listen to him with religious reverence, fixing his wide blue eyes, with their restless pupils, upon his friend’s fine face, and answering in his sonorous voice, which came like a clarion blast from under that veteran Gaul’s mustache of his. Their conversation rarely touched upon the current affairs of life, seldom wandered away from literary topics or literary history. Turgénieff would often come laden with foreign books, and would translate fluently poems by Goethe, Poushkin, or Swinburne.” He knew English; he knew Italian, German, and French. He was crazy over hunting—read his Memoirs of a Sportsman, miniature masterpieces—and crossed the Channel after good game in England.

“Life seems to grow over our heads like grass,” is a phrase of his that is pinned to my memory. It was written to Flaubert, “the dear old boy,” who might have profited by the other’s advice to cast theory to the winds and “do” something “passionate, torrid, glowing.” And yet as Henri Taine says, Madame Bovary is the greatest literary performance of the century. Turgénieff did not always follow his own preaching; “my publisher keeps circling around me like an eagle screaming for something,” he writes. Mr. James in a delicately humorous page wonders when Turgénieff found time to work. In Paris he was always at déjeuner—that gout of his was not acquired on wind. It was in Russia, where he went to bathe himself, as he puts it, that he took to long spells of toil. Turgénieff was most painstaking in the matter of technical references. He calls Flaubert’s attention to an error in L’Education Sentimentale. Madame Arnoux is made to sing very high notes, though she is a contralto. This was not overlooked by Turgénieff, who, as a friend of Madame Viardot, naturally enough heard much good singing in her salon. The mistake is all the more curious because made by Flaubert, one of the most conscientious men in literature. In a burst, a most lovable one, the Russian bids Flaubert, who was either in the cellar or celestial spaces, “Cheer up! After all you are Flaubert.” He writes from London, during the Franco-Prussian War, “We have hard times to go through, we who are born onlookers.”