rather
undistinguished series of musical interpretations of poetical subjects.
_Don Juan_ (op. 20) is much finer, and translates Lenau's poem into
music with bombastic vigour, showing us the hero who dreams of grasping
all the joy of the world, and how he fails, and dies after he has lost
faith in everything.

_Tod und Verklaerung_ ("Death and Transfiguration," op. 24[171]) marks
considerable progress in Strauss's thought and style. It is still one of
the most stirring of Strauss's works, and the one that is conceived with
the most perfect unity. It was inspired by a poem of Alexander Ritter's,
and I will give you an idea of its subject.

[Footnote 171: Composed in 1889, and performed for the first time at
Eisenach in 1890.]

In a wretched room, lit only by a nightlight, a sick man lies in bed.
Death draws near him in the midst of awe-inspiring silence. The unhappy
man seems to wander in his mind at times, and to find comfort in past
memories. His life passes before his eyes: his innocent childhood, his
happy youth, the struggles of middle age, and his efforts to attain the
splendid goal of his desires, which always eludes him. He had been
striving all his life for this goal, and at last thought it was within
reach, when Death, in a voice of thunder, cries, suddenly, "Stop!" And
even now in his agony he struggles desperately, being set upon
realising his dream; but the hand of Death is crushing life out of his
body, and night is creeping on. Then resounds in the heavens the promise
of that happiness which he had vainly sought for on earth--Redemption
and Transfiguration.

Richard Strauss's friends protested vigorously against this orthodox
ending; and Seidl,[1] Jorisenne,[2] and Wilhelm Mauke[3] pretended that
the subject was something loftier, that it was the eternal struggle of
the soul against its lower self and its deliverance by means of art. I
shall not enter into that discussion, though I think that such a cold
and commonplace symbolism is much less interesting than the struggle
with death, which one feels in every note of the composition. It is a
classical work, comparatively speaking; broad and majestic and almost
like Beethoven in style. The realism of the subject in the
hallucinations of the dying man, the shiverings of fever, the throbbing
of the veins, and the despairing agony, is transfigured by the purity of
the form in which it is cast. It is realism after the manner of the
symphony in C minor, whe