poem, do not feel as though some wild and troubling and panic
presence had leaned over the concert hall and bedeviled the orchestra.
For, in his hands, it is no longer the familiar and terrorless thing it
once had been, a thing about whose behavior one can be certain. It has
become a formidable engine of steel and gold, vibrant with mad and
unexpected things. Patterns leap and tumble out of it. Violin music
launches swiftly into space, trumpets run scales, the tempi move with
the velocity of express trains. It has become a giant, terrible bird,
the great auk of music, that seizes you in its talons and spirals into
the empyrean.

But it was what he seemed to promise to perform, to bring into being,
even more than what he had already definitely accomplished, that spread
about the figure of Strauss the peculiar radiance. It was Nietzsche who
had made current the dream of a new music, a music that should be
fiercely and beautifully animal, full of laughter, of the dry good light
of the intellect, of "salt and fire and the great, compelling logic, of
the light feet of the south, the dance of the stars, the quivering
dayshine of the Mediterranean." The other composers, the Beethovens and
Brahms and Wagners, had been sad, suffering, wounded men, men who had
lost their divine innocence and joy in the shambles, and whose spiritual
bodies were scarred, for all the muscular strength gained during their
fights, by hunger and frustration and agony. Pain had even marred their
song. For what should have been innocence and effortless movement and
godlike joy, Mozartean coordination and harmony, was full of terrible
cries, and convulsive, rending motions, and shrouding sorrow. And
Nietzsche had dreamt of music of another sort. He had dreamt of a music
that should be a bridge to the Superman, the man whose every motion
would be carefree. He had seen striding across mountain chains in the
bright air of an eternal morning a youth irradiant with unbroken energy,
before whom all the world lay open in vernal sunshine like a domain
before its lord. He had seen one beside whom the other musicians would
stand as convicts from Siberian prison camps who had stumbled upon a
banquet of the gods. He had seen a young Titan of music, drunken with
life and fire and joy, dancing and reeling and laughing on the top of
the world, and with fingers amid the stars, sending suns and
constellations crashing. He had caught sight of the old and eternally
youthful