eriod of apprenticeship passed, and all desire to write
symphonies and chamber-music in the styles of Schumann and Mendelssohn
and Brahms, to construct operas after the pattern of "Tannhaeuser" and
"Parsifal" gone out of him, this slender, sleepy young Bavarian with the
pale curly hair and mustaches had commenced to develop the expressive
power of music amazingly, to make the orchestra speak wonderfully as it
had never spoken before. Under his touch the symphony, that most rigid
and abstract and venerable of forms, was actually displaying some of the
novel's narrative and analytical power, its literalness and concreteness
of detail. It was describing the developments of a character, was
psychologizing as it had hitherto done only in conjunction with poetry
or the theater. Strauss made it represent the inflammations of the sex
illusion, comment upon Nietzsche and Cervantes, recount the adventures,
somersaults and end of a legendary rascal, portray a hero of our time.
He made all these intellectual concepts plastic in a music of a
brilliance and a sprightliness and mordancy that not overmany classic
symphonies can rival. Other and former composers, no doubt, had dreamt
of making the orchestra more concretely expressive, more precisely
narrative and descriptive. The "Pastoral" symphony is by no means the
first piece of deliberately, confessedly programmatic music. And before
Strauss, both Berlioz and Liszt had experimented with the narrative,
descriptive, analytical symphony. But it was only with Strauss that the
symphonic novel was finally realized.

Neither Berlioz nor Liszt had really embodied their programs in living
music. Liszt invariably sacrificed program to sanctioned musical form.
For all his radicalism, he was too trammeled by the classical concepts,
the traditional musical schemes and patterns to quite realize the
symphony based on an extra-musical scheme. His symphonic poems reveal
how difficult it was for him to make his music follow the curve of his
ideas. In "Die Ideale," for instance, for the sake of a conventional
close, he departed entirely from the curve of the poem of Schiller which
he was pretending to transmute. The variations in which he reproduced
Lamartine's verse are stereotyped enough. When was there a time when
composers did not deform their themes in amorous, rustic and warlike
variations? The relation between the pompous and somewhat empty "Lament
and Triumph" and the unique, the distinct thin