rong or full, who
no longer possesses the power of feeling anything at all, and is
inwardly wasted and dull and spent. The one had a burning and wonderful
pressure of speech. The other seems unable to concentrate energy and
interest sufficiently to create a hard and living piece of work. The
one seemed to blaze new pathways through the brain. The other steps
languidly in roadways well worn. He is not even amusing any longer. The
contriver of wonderful orchestral machines, the man who penetrated into
the death-chamber and stood under the gibbet, has turned to toying with
his medium, to imitating other composers, Mozart in "Der Rosenkavalier,"
Haendel in "Joseph's Legende," Offenbach and Lully (a coupling that only
Strauss has the lack of taste to bring about) in "Ariadne auf Naxos." He
has become increasingly facile and unoriginal, has taken to quoting
unblushingly Mendelssohn, Tchaikowsky, Wagner, himself, even. His
insensitivity has waxed inordinately, and led him to mix styles, to
commingle dramatic and coloratura passages, to jumble the idioms of
three centuries in a single work, to play all manner of pointless pranks
with his art. His literary taste has grown increasingly uncertain. He
who was once so careful in his choice of lyrics, and recognized the
talents of such modern German poets as Birnbaum and Dehmel and Mackay,
accepts librettos as dull and inartistic and precious as those with
which Hofmannsthal is supplying him, and lends his art to the boring
buffooneries of "Der Rosenkavalier" and "Ariadne auf Naxos." Something
in him has bent and been fouled.

One thing at least the Strauss of the tone-poems indisputably was. He
was freely, dazzlingly, daringly expressive. And this is what the
Strauss of the last years thinly and rarely is. It is not Oscar Wilde's
wax flowers of speech, nor the excessively stiff and conventionalized
action of "Salome," that bores one with the Strauss opera of that name.
It is not even the libretto of "Der Rosenkavalier," essentially coarse
and boorish and insensitive as it is beneath all its powdered
preciosity, that wearies one with Strauss's "Musical Comedy"; or the
hybrid, lame, tasteless form of "Ariadne auf Naxos" that turns one
against that little monstrosity. It is the generally inexpressive and
insufficient music in which Strauss has vested them. The music of
"Salome," for instance, is not even commensurable with Wilde's drama. It
was the evacuation of an obsessive desire, th