ny, his first
venture into the epic form, his failures are most numerous. More than
once, obviously attempting to roll up tone into a moving climax, he
succeeds only in muddling his colors. I remember one place--at the
moment I can't recall where it is--where the strings and the brass storm
at one another in furious figures. The blast of the brass, as the
vaudevillains say, gets across--but the fiddles merely scream absurdly.
The whole passage suggests the bleating of sheep in the midst of a vast
bellowing of bulls. Schumann overestimated the horsepower of fiddle
music so far up the E string--or underestimated the full kick of the
trumpets.... Other such soft spots are well known.

Why, then, go on parroting _gaucheries_ that Schumann himself, were he
alive today, would have long since corrected? Why not call an ecumenical
council, appoint a commission to see to such things, and then forget the
sacrilege? As a self-elected delegate from heathendom, I nominate Dr.
Richard Strauss as chairman. When all is said and done, Strauss probably
knows more about writing for orchestra than any other two men that ever
lived, not excluding Wagner. Surely no living rival, as Dr. Sunday would
say, has anything on him. If, after hearing a new composition by
Strauss, one turns to the music, one is invariably surprised to find how
simple it is. The performance reveals so many purple moments, so
staggering an array of lusciousness, that the ear is bemused into
detecting scales and chords that never were on land or sea. What the
exploratory eye subsequently discovers, perhaps, is no more than our
stout and comfortable old friend, the highly well-born _hausfrau_, Mme.
C Dur--with a vine leaf or two of C sharp minor or F major in her hair.
The trick lies in the tone-color--in the flabbergasting magic of the
orchestration. There are some moments in "Elektra" when sounds come out
of the orchestra that tug at the very roots of the hair, sounds so
unearthly that they suggest a caroling of dragons or _bierfisch_--and
yet they are made by the same old fiddles that play the Kaiser Quartet,
and by the same old trombones that the Valkyrie ride like witch's
broomsticks, and by the same old flutes that sob and snuffle in Tit'l's
Serenade. And in parts of "Feuersnot"--but Roget must be rewritten by
Strauss before "Feuersnot" is described. There is one place where the
harps, taking a running start from the scrolls of the violins, leap
slambang through (or