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crashing joy; but the effect of the whole is lost in repetitions that
choke it and make it heavy. Through all the work runs a mixture of
pedantic stiffness and incoherence; it moves along in a desultory way,
and suffers from abrupt checks in the course of its development and from
superfluous ideas that break in for no reason at all, with the result
that the whole hangs fire.

Above all, I fear Mahler has been sadly hypnotised by ideas about
power--ideas that are getting to the head of all German artists to-day.
He seems to have an undecided mind, and to combine sadness and irony
with weakness and impatience, to be a Viennese musician striving after
Wagnerian grandeur. No one expresses the grace of _Laendler_ and dainty
waltzes and mournful reveries better than he; and perhaps no one is
nearer the secret of Schubert's moving and voluptuous melancholy; and it
is Schubert he recalls at times, both in his good qualities and certain
of his faults. But he wants to be Beethoven or Wagner. And he is wrong;
for he lacks their balance and gigantic force. One saw that only too
well when he was conducting the _Choral Symphony_.

But whatever he may be, or whatever disappointment he may have brought
me at Strasburg, I will never allow myself to speak lightly or
scoffingly of him. I am confident that a musician with so lofty an aim
will one day create a work worthy of himself.

* * * * *

Richard Strauss is a complete contrast to Mahler. He has always the air
of a heedless and discontented child. Tall and slim, rather elegant and
supercilious, he seems to be of a more refined race than most other
German artists of to-day. Scornful, _blase_ with success, and very
exacting, his bearing towards other musicians has nothing of Mahler's
winning modesty. He is not less nervous than Mahler, and while he is
conducting the orchestra he seems to indulge in a frenzied dance which
follows the smallest details of his music--music that is as agitated as
limpid water into which a stone has been flung. But he has a great
advantage over Mahler; he knows how to rest after his labours. Both
excitable and sleepy by nature, his highly-strung nerves are
counterbalanced by his indolence, and there is in the depths of him a
Bavarian love of luxury. I am quite sure that when his hours of intense
living are over, after he has spent an excessive amount of energy, he
has hours when he is only partially alive. One then sees hi