fford such chances of spearing a
Wagner motive as it appears for a moment on the swift and boiling
stream of the Strauss orchestral narration. But if you have attained
the age of discretion you will not ask too much, forget such childish
and sinister play, and enjoy to the full the man's extraordinary gift
of music-making.

For Richard Strauss is an extraordinary musician. To begin with, he
doesn't look like a disorderly genius with rumpled hair, but is the
mildest-mannered man who ever scuttled another's score and smoked
Munich cigars or played "skat." And then he loves money! What
other composer, besides Handel, Haydn, Mozart--yes, and also
Beethoven--Gluck, Meyerbeer, Verdi, Puccini, so doted on the
box-office? Why shouldn't he? Why should he enrich the haughty music
publisher or the still haughtier intendant of the opera-house? As a
matter of fact, if R. Strauss were in such a hurry to grow rich, he
would write music of a more popular character. It would seem, then,
that he is a millionaire malgre lui, and that, no matter what he
writes, money flows into his coffers. Indeed, an extraordinary man.
Despite his spiritual dependence upon Wagner, and in his Tone-Poems,
upon Liszt and Berlioz, he has a very definite musical personality. He
has amplified, intensified the Liszt-Wagner music, adding to its
stature, also exaggerating it on the purely sensuous side. That he can
do what no other composer has done is proved by the score of his
latest opera Ariadne at Naxos, given for the first time in Stuttgart.
Here, with only thirty-six in the orchestra, a grand pianoforte and a
harmonium included, he produces the most ear-ravishing tones, thus
giving a negative to those who assert that without a gigantic
orchestral apparatus he is ineffectual. Strauss received a sound
musical education; he could handle the old symphonic form, absolute
music, before he began writing in the vein modern; his evolution has
been orderly and consistent. He looked before he leaped. His songs
prove him to be a melodist, the most original since Brahms in this
form. Otherwise, originality is conditioned. He is, for instance, not
as original as Claude Debussy, who has actually said something new.
Strauss, a rhetorician with enormous temperamental power, modifies the
symphonic form of Liszt, boils down the Wagnerian trilogy into an hour
and thirty minutes of seething, white-hot passion, and paints all the
moods, human and inhuman, with incomparable virt