it is scarcely present, or scarcely realisable; and that is a much
more difficult thing, and really a more important thing, for the proper
appreciation of music, than the heightening of what is already fine, and
obviously fine in itself. And this particular quality of interpretation
has its value too as criticism. For, while it gives the utmost value to
what is implicitly there, there at least in embryo, it cannot create out
of nothing; it cannot make insincere work sincere, or fill empty work
with meaning which never could have belonged to it. Brahms, at his
moments of least vitality, comes into a new vigour of life; but Strauss,
played by these sincere, precise, thoughtful musicians shows, as he
never could show otherwise, the distance at which his lively spectre
stands from life. When I heard the "Don Juan," which I had heard twice
before, and liked less the second time than the first, I realised
finally the whole strain, pretence, and emptiness of the thing. Played
with this earnest attention to the meaning of every note, it was like a
trivial drama when Duse acts it; it went to pieces through being taken
at its own word. It was as if a threadbare piece of stuff were held up
to the full sunlight; you saw every stitch that was wanting.

The "Don Juan" was followed by the Entr'acte and Ballet music from
"Rosamunde," and here the same sunlight was no longer criticism, but
rather an illumination. I have never heard any music more beautifully
played. I could only think of the piano playing of Pachmann. The faint,
delicate music just came into existence, breathed a little, and was
gone. Here for once was an orchestra which could literally be overheard.
The overture to the "Meistersinger" followed, and here, for the first
time, I got, quite flawless and uncontradictory, the two impressions
which that piece presents to one simultaneously. I heard the unimpeded
march forward, and I distinguished at the same time every delicate
impediment thronging the way. Some renderings give you a sense of
solidity and straightforward movement; others of the elaborate and
various life which informs this so solid structure. Here one got the
complete thing, completely rendered.

I could not say the same of the rendering of the overture to "Tristan."
Here the notes, all that was so to speak merely musical in the music,
were given their just expression; but the something more, the vast heave
and throb of the music, was not there. It was "clas