SubmittedFriday, 03 May 2019
complete contrast to Mahler
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, blasé 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 his eyes with a vague and sleepy look in them; and he is like old Rameau, who used to walk about for hours as if he were an automaton, seeing nothing and thinking of nothing.
At Strasburg Strauss conducted his Sinfonia Domestica, whose programme seems boldly to defy reason, and even good taste. In the symphony he pictures himself with his wife and his boy («Meiner lieben Frau und unserm Jungen gewidmet»). «I do not see,» said Strauss, «why I should not compose a symphony about myself; I find myself quite as interesting as Napoleon or Alexander.» Some people have replied that everybody else might not share his interest. But I shall not use that argument; it is quite possible for an artist of Strauss’s worth to keep us entertained. What grates upon me more is the way in which he speaks of himself. The disproportion between his subject and the means he has of expressing it is too strong. Above all, I do not like this display of the inner and secret self. There is a want of reticence in this Sinfonia Domestica. The fireside, the sitting-room, and the bedchamber, are open to all-comers. Is this the family feeling of Germany to-day? I admit that the first time I heard the work it jarred upon me for purely moral reasons, in spite of the liking I have for its composer. But afterwards I altered my first opinion, and found the music admirable. Do you know the programme?
this was: Complete Contrast To Mahler
go to next chapter: a man, a woman, and a child
