to the third act, and the brilliant trio. It has all the
worst faults of the libretto. Hofmannsthal's "comedy for music," though
gross and vulgar in spirit, and unoriginal in design, is full of a sort
of clever preciosity, full of piquant details culled from
eighteenth-century prints and memoirs. The scene of the coiffing is a
print of Hogarth's translated to the stage; Rofrano's name "Octavian
Maria Ehrenreich Bonaventura Fernand Hyazinth" is like an essay on the
culture of the Vienna of Canaletto; the polite jargon of
eighteenth-century aristocratic Austria spoken by the characters, with
its stiff, courteous forms and intermingled French, must have been
studied from old journals and gazettes. And Strauss's score is equally
precious, equally a thing of erudition and cleverness. Mozart turned the
imbecilities of Schickaneder to his uses; Weber triumphed over the
ridiculous romancings of Helmine von Chezy. But Strauss follows
Hofmannsthal helplessly, soddenly. Just as Hofmannsthal imitates
Hogarth, so Strauss imitates Mozart, affects his style, his turns, his
spirit; inserts a syrupy air in the style of Haendel or Mehul in the
first act; and jumbles Mozart with modern comic-opera waltzes, Haendel
with post-Wagnerian incantations. And like Hofmannsthal's libretto, the
score remains a superficial and formless thing. The inner and coherent
rhythm, the spiritual beat and swing, the great unity and direction, are
wanting. "I have always wanted to write an opera like Mozart's, and now
I have done it," Strauss is reported to have said after the first
performance of "Der Rosenkavalier." But "Der Rosenkavalier" is almost
antipodal to "Don Giovanni" or to "Falstaff" or to "Die Meistersinger"
or to any of the great comic operas. For it lacks just the thing the
others possess abundantly, a strong lyrical movement, a warm emotion
that informs the music bar after bar, scene after scene, act after act,
and imparts to the auditor the joy, the vitality, the beauty of which
the composers' hearts were full. It is a long while since Strauss has
felt anything of the sort.

Had the new time produced no musical art, had no Debussy nor Scriabine,
no Strawinsky nor Bloch, put in appearance, one might possibly have
found oneself compelled to believe the mournful decadence of Richard
Strauss the inevitable development awaiting musical genius in the modern
world. There exists a group, international in composition, which, above
all other contemporar