uosity. It is a
question of manner rather than matter. He is even a greater virtuoso
than Hector Berlioz, and infinitely more tender; he is Meyerbeer in
his opportunism, but there the comparison may be dropped, for old
Meyerbeer could shake tunes out of his sleeve with more facility than
does Strauss--and that is saying a lot. No, the style of Strauss is
his own, notwithstanding his borrowings from Liszt and Wagner. He is
not as original as either one, for he employs them both as his point
of departure; but when you begin to measure up the power, the scope,
and the versatility of his productions you are filled with a wholesale
admiration for the almost incredible activity of the man, for his
ambitions, his marvellous command of every musical form, above all,
for his skill as a colourist.

Sometimes he hits it and sometimes he doesn't. After two hearings of
Ariadne at Naxos in the smaller of the two new royal opera-houses at
Stuttgart, I came to the conclusion that both composer and librettist,
while greatly daring, had attempted the impossible, and therefore
their work, despite its many excellencies, missed fire. In the first
place, Herr Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the poet of Elektra and Der
Rosercavalier, conceived the unhappy idea that Moliere's Le Bourgeois
Gentilhomme might be butchered to make a Straussian holiday and serve
merely as a portico for the one-act opera that follows. But the
portico turned out to be too large for the operatic structure. The
dovetailing of play and music is at best a perilous proceeding. Every
composer knows that. To give two acts of spoken Moliere (ye gods! and
spoken in German) with occasional interludes of music, and then top it
off with a mixture of opera seria and commedia del arte, is to invite
a catastrophe. To be sure, the unfailing tact of Strauss in his
setting of certain episodes of the Moliere play averted a smash-up,
but not boredom. In the second place, the rather heavy fooling of the
actors, excellent artists all, made Moliere as dull as a London fog.
The piece is over two hundred and fifty years old; it must be played
by French actors, therefore in the German version sadly suffers. I
hear that it has been still further cut down, and at the present
writing there is some gossip to the effect that Ariadne will be sung
some day without the truncated version of Moliere by the ingenious
Herr Hofmannsthal.

II

At the general rehearsal, the ni