MR

RICHARD STRAUSS

ARCHIBALD HENDERSON

TODERN art means self-expression. That may well sound like a truism settled by the crystallized conviction of ages, the labors of generations of inspired workers. But, wonderful as has been much past art in its revelation of the personality of the artist, it yet remains true that the domain of self has boundaries which modern art is widening and enlarging, not slowly and progressively, but by great leaps and bounds. In the world of art, it is the great personality which counts, which "tells "-to use the happy phrase of the day. The new figure appears-staggers the world with his novelty, his heresy, his barbarity. The ancient custodians of the sacred altar of art cry out in horror against the defilement of the sanctuary. The public awakes to a new stimulus, and slowly begins to heed the new voice, at once so strange and so surpassing sweet. The critics potter about aimlessly in the struggle to adjust themselves to the new conditions; begin to find rare and haunting beauties in the new art, amidst the welter of barbaric novelty; excuse, elucidate, then analyze, appraise, appreciate, praise, laud. Then at last the miracle is wrought, and the new artist is secure in his greatness. Once secure, nothing can dislodge him—not even the indifference of a waning public, or the depreciation of the iconoclastic critic who seeks to win for himself fame or notoriety by prophesying and so accelerating the downfall of one of the masters of reality.

The curse of modern life is the passion for novelty. To be recognized, to become "great," the artist must be "different "he must strike out along a track unnoticed or abandoned by his predecessors. Even with such innovation, the modern public is not satisfied. For their idol must not only surpass others he must continually surpass himself. Each new work must, to impress the contemporary, reveal certain traits of genius hitherto unsuspected or at least unrealized. Versatility-ability to achieve momentous results in widely varying forms of art-is

the keyword of success. Many men, many women, achieve a certain sort of notoriety, even eminence, by excelling in some particular and limited detail of work-the writer who can achieve excellence only in the short story, the novelist who succeeds in portraying to the life the traits and characteristics of a peculiar people or a circumscribed locality, the painter who can only make portraits or project "nocturnes," the sculptor who can only make busts or figures. The artist who would achieve greatness to-day is he who would go a step beyond perfection in a single phase, and exhibit perfection, or at least mastery, in many phases of his chosen element of work.

Lastly, in order to achieve preëminence in the art world of to-day, the artist needs a last-a fundamental-quality, which in reality dominates all the others. George Meredith never swung the public off its feet, never created that profound popular and international impression, to which his ideas, if not his works, so justly entitle him. But he understood the quintessential traits of the modern temperament and the modern mind in the most tremendously significant way. In the expression of his convictions, he had the writer of fiction and perhaps of poetry principally in mind. But the ideas to which he gave such elaborate and such exquisitely lucid expression are, in truth, the ideas which most completely mirror the characteristic features of our time. For he realized, as perhaps no one before him had realized certainly vastly more succinctly than had been expressed before the imperative necessity of animating modern art with thought. He gave a conclusive expression of that unique trait of modern art which seems stamped in bold image and superscription upon its front. The day of mere narration in fiction is past; the day of mere portraiture in art is past; the day of mere passional expression in music is past. Under the new dispensation, the modern artist must be a thinker as well as a craftsman, a philosopher as well as a creative genius. Passion undirected by intellect, emotion uncontrolled by intelligence, has already played out its rôle for the generations of to-day. The hero of modern art is the thinker, the philosopher, who fires his genius with the fuel of brain-stuff.

Whatever his faults and deficiencies and indeed tremendous

failings may be, Richard Strauss fulfils in a curiously striking and detailed way the demands of the modern temperament, and the modern taste. For step by step he has been widening the domain of his power, reaching out after more themes for the exhibition of his astounding virtuosity. As each new achievement laid its hold upon the public and startled them with the conviction that here, in fine, was the "last word in music," he must have smiled with the consciousness of the possession of a vast store of powers yet untapped. Soon the new work would appear, and again the public would have to alter and revise its former appraisal-realizing again that here was something new" under the sun. Now, once more, we are forced to take a new inventory of the genius of Richard Strauss in the light of his latest work, Der Rosenkavalier, on the book of Hugo von Hofmannsthal. That the author of Salomé and of Elektra, the musical interpreter par excellence of morbidity and monomania, should turn to the lightness of Viennese frivolity, should respond to the blandishments of the valse, is the most unexpected and incredible surprise in the history of contemporary music.

Recently I have heard, in succession, Salomé, Elektra, and Der Rosenkavalier, and so have been enabled, in a peculiarly specific way, to compare and appraise the qualities, so varying and so infinitely surprising, of the composer. Interspersed between these performances came Wagner-Wagner early and Wagner late; Humperdinck and Debussy; and many others of the modern and contemporary schools. And the mental and emotional reactions from the varying and evolutionally developing types of modern opera were set to converging upon the genius of Strauss, and forced me to consider why it was that Strauss stood out, among them all, so unique, so individual, and so preeminent. Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande gave me intimations of a very subtle and very refined genius-a musical temperament so peculiarly plastic and adaptable that he seemed, in very truth, to be the voice of Maeterlinck himself speaking in music. These eery strains, caught as if on the verge of an abyss of other-world harmony, seemed instinctively felt for expressing the fateful sadness of the poem. The characters, in a wholly French cast at Covent Garden, uttering their dolorous

plaints with the delicate nasality of the Gallic timbre, move as if in a dream through the scenes of their predestined fatewith a hopelessness, a sad sense of imminent misfortune incomparably poetic and tragic. There was no confusion of thought here between the evocation of the poem and the message of the music-the two were one. Such collaboration is nothing short of a miracle of art.

I have spoken of Debussy because he has, in common with Strauss, that strikingly modern faculty: the genius for rendering temperamental nuances and emotive complexities with convincing and convicting reality. The preeminence of Strauss, if I may so put it, arises from a deeper foundation of technique and a more spontaneous barbarity and naïveté. I remember the very peculiar impression left upon me by watching Strauss conduct his own Elektra. I will not say that I have never seen an orchestra respond so instinctively to the slight movement of the baton. This quality was not outstanding in the conducting of Straussand, indeed, I have a number of times seen a closer accord, a more sympathetic rapprochement between conductor and orchestra. Strauss impressed me so much with his fiery, yet chiefly calm, mastery of his instrument, the orchestra, and his evident identity, in every fibre of his composition, with the minutest phrase of the music, that I found my attention continually wandering from the stage to the rostrum. With one hand, Strauss would hold in subjection one portion of the orchestra, while with the other he would let loose a perfect frenzy of repressed exertion, his whole arm, the hand, and even each separate finger working convulsively. Strauss is the impersonation of disciplined, controlled passion. To see Strauss conduct an opera like Elektra is to realize much about his music-the restraint, rather than the much lamented abandon, of his fiery genius, the latent powers of discipline and control which he has at his command.

That quality of Strauss's genius which seems to subsume and embody the quintessence of his art is the gift for packing his musical subject with the utmost of emotive content. Much may be said for the Strauss of the earlier manner-the tone poet, the conveyancer of grave and stately moods. Much may be said for the Strauss of the earlier operatic manner-of Guntram

with its march of vaguely stately import, of Feuersnot with its own simple motifs and somewhat juvenile controversiality. It is, really, not until we encounter the Strauss of Salomé that the supreme novelty of his genius, the differentiating trait which gives him his preeminence to-day, first starts into full and active life. Tolstoy deplored the unreality of opera for the great mass of humanity, its inadequacy and ineffectiveness as a great artmedium in a modern democratic civilization. And how much justice there is in his plaint! Let any person, however clever or ingenious he be, seek to realize, without previous careful and thoughtful study of the book and story, the meanings of the operas of the past-or even of the present. Amidst the welter of silly stage-trappings and all the unnatural conventions of gesture and posture, he will be able to disengage from the music itself no coherent meaning and philosophy. He will be totally deaf to all the extravagantly lauded "descriptive" passages of the music-haphazardly guessing at times, perhaps, that this phrase may represent the bleating of sheep, the singing of birds, or the galloping of a horse-but actually losing the key, the mystic Open Sesame, to all the inner content of the story, the musical expression of which furnishes such ready excuse for the highly imaginative rhapsodist already familiar with the book. This is the Achilles heel of opera, or, to change the figure, the viewless and opaque barrier which removes it so subtly from the crowd-consciousness of the masses. It is a fault, an almost insuperable fault, as true of Mozart as of Bizet, of Wagner as of Humperdinck.

I dare to say that first decisively in Salomé, and later with splendid conclusiveness in Elektra, Strauss has wrought the miracle of writing opera which is its own commentary. The music and the story are identical and co-existent; the music, the action, actually "convey" the story without the necessity for printed explication. It is conceivable that in some opera of the past, the fable and the music are thus mated-but I do not know its name. The explanation of this strangely novel and unique phase of Strauss's art may be easy to find; but I dare say it is easy to find a wrong reason for this unquestioned fact. If it be urged that Strauss has chosen fables which carry their meaning on their very