the subject of long experiment, music, as we know it, at length emerged from the centuries, virtually a modern art. the fate of its founders and their followers for long after, is that the names of these are well-nigh forgotten, and their works are heard no more. because of them the later comers have survived rich through inheritance, but perhaps no richer by nature.
again has music reached the experimental stage. sweeping upward in mighty spiral, and so conforming to creation's universal trend, now, at a point of departure overlooking the old, it finds inadequate that result of compromise, the diatonic scale. it faces the problem of tonality and those modern questions which a higher, wider outlook brings to view.
in estimating the value and longevity of strauss' art, let us remember that the ancient experimenters in music evolved no definite types as nature in her domain has done. half-formed, their pale and bloodless attempts have perished from sheer lack of vitality. on the other hand, the tone-dramas of our most modern virtuoso are anything but an?mic; an all-too-turbulent flood rushes through their every vein. so much is strauss a product of his time that the characteristics now placing him in the forefront would have little availed him in an age believing with schumann that harmony is king and melody queen in the composer's realm.
were strauss endowed with a lyric gift comparable to that of schubert, probably he would be impelled to exercise that gift almost within the compass of convention. were he, like handel, able to accomplish the majestic and the magical without recourse to chromatic progression, the bizarre would lead him less far afield. again, were he capable of a kingdom like that wherein beethoven, reigning by divine right, reigned supreme, surely he would not have sought the seemingly unfruitful wastes, the perhaps barren saharas of sound. deficient in the crowning qualities of these masters, but not deficient in genius, he imagined, and actually undertook with ardor, that of which they could never have dreamed.
having accredited strauss with genius, though of a peculiar sort, we are led, for the better understanding of this master, to ask, what is genius? to this query the wisdom of all ages has given various answers. according to plato, a genius is one whose vision of beauty, truth, and good, existing in the divine mind, is clearer than that of other men. therefore genius does not actually originate. its office is to translate, to reproduce the great originals, the eternal archetypes of the super-mundane world. because of his high vision the artist reproduces beauty, the philosopher truth, while the saint, enamoured of good, both teaches and practices it.
granting this, we are at once led to ask, why the penetrating vision of genius? to this query a brief answer is that because the possibilities either latent or unfolding in man are immeasurable as the universe itself, therefore that which men are pleased to call genius is but the foreshowing of what the race as a whole shall attain to, but, in the present stage of human progress, genius is in fact a rare exception to nature's slow and thorough methods. nevertheless, the price of its defiance of the universal law must be paid by genius, and that price is unsymmetrical development.
because of unsymmetrical development, genius may at times produce what, to the average normal being would seem the work of a degenerate mind; but in estimating strauss it should be considered that the tonal interpreter of don quixote can often be sanely logical, and even wholly conventional.
the genius of strauss, like that of whitman, is essentially the genius of the explorer. each of these burned to reach the limits of his art and plant victorious feet upon the pole. as in the material world, so here, such daring spirits are necessary if we would know the geography of the world of tone. to our old musical possessions, strauss has joined a vast and as yet vague territory much of which, while of little present value, may yet develop unexpected and perhaps indispensable uses.
it argues against the real sanity of strauss' art as a whole, that, for the exercise of his gifts, he chooses oscar wilde's version of the story of salomé, a version in which the central theme is a monstrous and revolting passion unmatchable in actual life, and even unthinkable except by the sexual pervert. also, it is ominous that strauss undertakes the tonal treatment of the brilliantly written but illogical work, ?thus spake zarathustra;? a work wherein is discovered the philosopher neitzsche's ideal, the earth-shaping, earth-dominating man to be, a proud, unconcerned, scornful, violent, and fear-inspiring personage beloved of wisdom the goddess woman that loves the warrior only. in this ?super man? evolved evil and evolved good are necessary. free from gods, and every adoration save that of self, he rises over unnumbered small folk and timorous weaklings, and that protection artfully invented for them by the christian church, ?slave morality;? and so he attains his goal, ?master morality,? that which, to all but the mind of the moral pervert, is the morality of the tyrant whose will none dares gainsay.
we have already contended that the wide departure of strauss was natural and necessary to a genius lacking in certain gifts indispensable to the older schools; also we have accredited him with being a compound of various tendencies essentially modern. it may with assurance be affirmed that the art of sound could have originated only in a time like our own, a time whose methods are well illustrated by the attitude of certain of our modern novelists.
having proved to themselves and their following the correctness of the new methods, and the falsity of the old, these have largely abandoned plot and incident, and devoted their talents to psychology. now while it is incontestable that walter scott could by no means have brought to the trivial and the commonplace the analytical mind of henry james, still we venture that the world has lost nothing because of this. the poor plodding world looks downward; so its eyes must again and again be diverted from the trivial and the commonplace, and lifted toward an ideal which, even if overdrawn, is immeasurably better than none.
while preferring to grope in the dark regions of the abnormal, the art of strauss, the art of the modern psychologist has, as one might expect, often treated the trivial and the commonplace. besides it is evident that neither in salomé nor in ?thus spake zarathustra? has it given to the world a normal ideal. with the great masters of the past it was always an ideal, the noblest within the range of their inspired vision. to haydn it was the terrestrial eden yet undarkened by the fall. to handel it was the greater adam, and his coming long foretold. to bach it was gethsemane, and its immortal, crowning passion of sorrow. to mendelssohn it was the prophet and the saint those rich flowerings of his ancient race. to wagner it was the eternal womanly prompting to noblest deeds of devotion and self-sacrifice.
with men like these, the presentation of high moral ideals resulted from intuitive knowledge that the perpetuity of mankind, as something nobler than the brute kingdom, depends upon acceptance of these ideals, and therefore any so-called masterpiece which brings about confusion of ideals, would render the real purpose of art abortive.
the music of such masters as haydn and mozart voices the pure emotions spontaneous in the breast of man. god-given emotions, never to be quenched, they will burst into utterance while throbs the human heart. the evolution of music, as of all art, accords with the evolution of man from a creature of primal impulses to one of a thousand involved emotions and interests. the latest methods of strauss are fraught with peculiar peril to his art, as an epitome of life, in that a well-nigh exclusive use of obscure and chromatic harmonies is restricting that art to an expression of complex emotions only. now, while through no composer however gifted can music revert to the prevailing simplicity of handel, still, whatever its evolution, it must as an epitome of life, have moments of native and simple emotion. therefore it was a sane and saving reaction which turned the efforts of strauss from the abnormal to the smaller, more subdued models of the song writer, and also to that wholesome and human idyll, the enoch arden of tennyson.
as an orchestral writer, strauss has gathered to himself the technical knowledge of berlioz, liszt, and wagner. having enlarged his resources through original discovery, he dazzles by display of a virtuosity wholly unprecedented. technically he is fully equipped for exploration; and thus he is pushing on into that new hemisphere the realm of sound.
in our exposition we have endeavored to point out certain tendencies in the work of strauss, tendencies which endanger realism in every art whatsoever, tendencies which we believe are turning strauss from full and sane achievement, and so from his prospective goal the art of sound. that such an art is legitimate and actually within sight we have endeavored to show, as also the certainty that, once our possession, it will supplement and not supersede its predecessors. failing to find in strauss the lofty personage his worshippers deem him to be, we nevertheless have accredited him with real though peculiar genius, and this is but justice due. living in a transition period largely of his own bringing about, he has produced both the unquestioned and the problematical. but that problematical can be ignored or forgotten no more than the problematical of whitman. at very least, it will survive as a curiosity of tonal art.
in his theoretical writings on the opera and the drama, wagner likens music to the soulless nymph, a real woman only through the love of some man. poetry, to wagner, is that masculine endowing music with an immortal part. this novel finding of the poet-musician is but the outcome of a theory; an outcome which the patent facts easily and wholly refute. instrumental music when treated by a virile master, like wagner himself, can be masculine enough, while, in the hands of a versifier gifted chiefly with grace and smoothness, poetry, the masculine art so called, becomes weakly feminine, or even a characterless thing not attaining to sex.
wagner's theories are founded on a philosophy essentially of eastern origin, but, had he looked deeper, our speculator would have discovered that eastern philosophy considers sex to be but an outward manifestation incident to the present stage of world evolution. the human soul, and also the soul of every art, contains within itself the potentiality of both male and female. sex in the physical world is lack of equilibrium, the temporary preponderance in the soul of specific male or female characteristics outwardly exhibited, but, in the mental world, the offspring of highest genius would attain an equilibrium superior to distinction of sex.
in art, as in man its author, the masculine, untempered by the feminine, becomes not wisely masterful, but harsh and brutal; hence the peril of strauss. the feminine, untempered by the masculine, becomes not intuitive, but weakly capricious and wholly illogical; hence the peril of debussy. the great authors, whichever their sex, have produced works wherein specific male and female characteristics modify one another.
this view of sex in art makes for the validity of instrumental music as such, and re?nforces the position of strauss when, in his wholly instrumental tone poems, he would delineate every phase of life, and even certain phases of philosophic thought as wagner, despite theory, has done in his ?faust overture.?
owing to the increasing vogue of strauss, no prophet is necessary to foretell a rank growth of imitators. these, because barren of originality, will succeed in copying the eccentricities rather than the merits of their model. what infliction, what torture to human ears will result from the inevitable bedlam of noise and fury, the near future must reveal. but let us believe that a modicum of pity and saving common sense, in even the most cruel devotee of such a school, will insure speedy reaction toward saner and more satisfying methods.
while ignoring not its old estate, music is moving from its centre in the emotional nature, to a stronghold well within the intellectual life. failures and wanderings indeed must be, but stagnation never in this onward world. so, looking to desired fulfillment, let us prophesy of music such rise as that of man from his emotional, half-formed self toward an ideal not coldly intellectual, but always warmly and nobly human with what the future foreshadows, namely, the balanced blending of emotion and mind, the ideal of both man and his artistic creations, in fact, the ideal of ideals in whose very anticipation is forgotten the ?super man? of nieztsche.
