elssohn, Chopin, Schumann, and Brahms. It is to Ritter alone I am
indebted for my knowledge of Liszt and Wagner; it was he who showed me
the importance of the writings and works of these two masters in the
history of art. It was he who by years of lessons and kindly counsel
made me a musician of the future (_Zukunftsmusiker_), and set my feet on
a road where now I can walk unaided and alone. It was he also who
initiated me in Schopenhauer's philosophy."

The second influence, that of the South, dates from April, 1886, and
seems to have left an indelible impression upon Strauss. He visited Rome
and Naples for the first time, and came back with a symphonic fantasia
called _Aus Italien_. In the spring of 1892, after a sharp attack of
pneumonia, he travelled for a year and a half in Greece, Egypt, and
Sicily. The tranquillity of these favoured countries filled him with
never-ending regret. The North has depressed him since then, "the
eternal grey of the North and its phantom shadows without a sun."[168]
When I saw him at Charlottenburg, one chilly April day, he told me with
a sigh that he could compose nothing in winter, and that he longed for
the warmth and light of Italy. His music is infected by that longing;
and it makes one feel how his spirit suffers in the gloom of Germany,
and ever yearns for the colours, the laughter, and the joy of the South.

[Footnote 168: Nietzsche.]

Like the musician that Nietzsche dreamed of,[169] he seems "to hear
ringing in his ears the prelude of a deeper, stronger music, perhaps a
more wayward and mysterious music; a music that is super-German, which,
unlike other music, would not die away, nor pale, nor grow dull beside
the blue and wanton sea and the clear Mediterranean sky; a music
super-European, which would hold its own even by the dark sunsets of the
desert; a music whose soul is akin to the palm trees; a music that knows
how to live and move among great beasts of prey, beautiful and solitary;
a music whose supreme charm is its ignorance of good and evil. Only from
time to time perhaps there would flit over it the longing of the sailor
for home, golden shadows, and gentle weaknesses; and towards it would
come flying from afar the thousand tints of the setting of a moral world
that men no longer understood; and to these belated fugitives it would
extend its hospitality and sympathy." But it is always the North, the
melancholy of the North, and "all the sadness of mankind," mental