much fear of contradiction
that for him Wagner is his model--even in Salome, where the head of
John the Baptist is chanted to the tune of Donner's motive from
Rheingold.

At the Stuttgart festival, in 1912, which endured a week, I was struck
by the Wagner obsession in the music of his only legitimate successor.
To alter an old quotation, we may say: He who steals my ideas steals
trash: ideas are as cheap and plentiful as potatoes in season; but he
who steals my style takes from me the only true thing I possess. Now,
Richard Strauss in addition to being a master of form, rather of all
musical forms, is also the master-colourist of the orchestra. No one,
not even Wagner, o'ertops him in this respect, though Wagner and
Berlioz and Liszt showed him the way. Why, then, does he lean so
heavily on Wagner, not alone on his themes--for Strauss is, above all,
a melodist--but on his moods; in a word, the Wagnerian atmosphere? I
noted that wherever a situation analogous to one in the Wagnerian
music-drama presented itself the music of the protean younger Richard
was coloured by memories of the elder composer. For example, in
Ariadne at Naxos, the heroine is discovered outstretched on her island
in the very abandonment of despair. We hear faint echoes of the last
pages of Tristan and Isolde; no sooner do three women begin to sing
than is conjured up a vision (aural, of course) of the Rhine maidens.
In Feuersnot the legendary tone was unavoidable, yet there is too much
of Die Meistersinger in this early work. Does a duenna appear with the
heroine, at once you are reminded of Eva and Magdalena; and in the
balcony scene, so different in situation from Lohengrin, Elsa
nevertheless peers from behind the figure of Diemut. As for the
lovers, Kunrad and Diemut, they, taking advantage of the darkness, as
Mr. Henderson once remarked of another opera, Azrael, appropriated the
musical colour--let me put the case mildly--of the duo of Walther and
Eva. Wagner dead remains the imperious tyrant, a case of musical
mortmain, the lawyers would put it; a hand reaching from his grave
dictating the doings of the living. The great chorus in Feuersnot,
after the fires are extinguished, because of the Alberich-like curse
of Kunrad, is not without suggestions from the street fight in Die
Meistersinger, and the wild wailings of the Walkyrie brood. Thus, if
you are looking for reminiscences, I know of few composers whose work,
vast and varied as it is, will a