The first-fruits of Ritter's influence upon Strauss were the symphonic fantasiaAus Italien(1886). The young revolutionary as yet moves with a certain amount of circumspection. The new work is poetic, programmatic, but it is cast in the conventional four-movement form, the separate movements corresponding roughly to those of the ordinary symphony. It is obviously a 'prentice work,’ but it is of significance in Strauss's history for a warmth of emotion that had been only rarely perceptible in his earlier music. Here and there it has the rude, knockabout sort of energy that was noticeable in some of the earlier works, and that in the later works was to degenerate into a mere noisy slamming about of commonplaces; but it also shows much poetic feeling, and in particular an ardent romantic appreciation of nature.
Aus Italienwas followed by a series of remarkable tone-poems—Don Juan(op. 20, 1888),Macbeth(op. 23, written 1886-7 but not published until after theDon Juan),Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche(op. 28, 1894-95),Also sprach Zarathustra(op. 30, 1894-95),Don Quixote(op. 39, 1897),Ein Heldenleben(op. 40, 1898), and theSymphonia Domestica(op. 53, 1903). With the last-named work Strauss bade farewell to the concert room for many years, the next stage of his development being worked out in the opera house.
The forms, no less than the titles, of the orchestral works, reveal the many-sidedness of Strauss's mind, the keenness of his interest in life and literary art, the individuality of the point of view from which he regards each of his subjects, and the peculiarly logical medium he adopts for the expression of each of them. Bound up with this adaptability are a certain restlessness that drives him on to abandon every field in turn before he has developed all the possibilities of it, and a certainanxiety to 'hit the public between the eyes' each time that gives him now and then the appearance of exploiting new sensations for new sensations' sake. It is perhaps not doing him any injustice, for instance, to suppose that a very keen finger upon the public pulse warned him that it would be unwise to bombard it with another blood-and-lust drama of the type ofSalomeandElektra; so, with an admirably sure instinct, he relaxes into the broad comedy ofDer Rosenkavalier. Feeling after this that the public wanted something newer still, he tried, inAriadne auf Naxos, to combine drama and opera in the one work. Then, realizing from the Western European successes of the Russians that ballet is likely to become the order of the day, he tries his hand at a modified form of this in 'The Legend of Joseph.'
What in the later works has become, however, almost as much a commercial as an artistic impulse, was in the early years the genuine quick-change of a very fertile, eager spirit, with extraordinary powers of poetic and graphic expression in music. Strauss, like Wagner, is a musical architect by instinct; he can plan big edifices and realize them. The sureness of this instinct is incidentally shown by the varied forms of these early and middle-period orchestral works of his. As we have seen, the writer of symphonic poems is always confronted by the serious problem of harmonizing a poetic with a musical development; and in practice we find that, as a rule, either the following of the literary idea destroys the purely musical logic of the work, or, in his anxiety to preserve a formal logic in his music, the composer has to impair the simplicity or the continuity of the poetic scheme, as Strauss has had to do in the passage inTill Eulenspiegel, already cited. But, on the whole, Strauss has come much nearer than any other composer to solving the problem of combined poetic and musical form in instrumental music. InMacbethhe has 'internalized' the dramatic action in a very remarkable way—a procedure he might have adopted with advantage on other occasions. Here, where there was every temptation to the superficially effective painting of externalities, he has dissolved the pictorial and episodical into the psychological, making Macbeth's own soul the centre of all the dramatic storm and stress, and so allowing full scope for the purely expressive power of music. InDon Juanthe form is rightly quasi-symphonic—a group of workable main themes representing the hero, with a group of subsidiary themes suggestive of the minor characters that cross his path and the circumstances under which he meets with them. The tissue is not woven throughout with absolute continuity, but the form as a whole is lucid and coherent. The episodical adventures ofTill Eulenspiegelcould find no better musical frame than the rondo form that Strauss has chosen for them; while the variation form is most suited to the figures, the adventures, and the psychology of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. In theSymphonia Domesticathe number and relationship of the characters, and the incidents that make up the domestic day, are best treated in a form that is virtually that of the ordinary symphony compressed into a single movement. A similar congruity between form and matter will be found inAlso sprach ZarathustraandEin Heldenleben.
This fertility of form was only the outward and visible sign of an extraordinary fertility of conception. No other composer, before or since, has poured such a wealth of thinking into program music, created so many poetic-musical types, or depicted theirmilieuwith such graphic power. Each new work, dealing as it did with new characters and new scenes, spontaneously found for itself a new idiom, melodic, harmonic and rhythmic; in this unconscious transformation of his speech in accordance with the inward vision Straussresembles Wagner and Hugo Wolf. The immense energy of the mind is shown not only in the range and variety of its psychology, but physically, as it were, in the wide trajectory of the melodies, the powerful gestures of the rhythms that sometimes, indeed, become almost convulsive—and the long-breathed phraseology of passages like the opening section ofEin Heldenleben.
It was perhaps inevitable that this extraordinary energy should occasionally get out of hand and degenerate into a sort ofUnbändigkeit. Strauss is at once a man of genius and an irresponsible street urchin. With all his gifts, something that goes to the making of the artist of the very greatest kind is lacking in him. He has a giant span of conception that is rare in music; but he seems to take a pleasure in constructing gigantic edifices only to spoil them for the admiring spectator by scrawling a fatuity or an obscenity across the front of them. He can be, at times, unaccountably perverse, malicious, childish towards his own creations. This element in him, or rather the seeds from which it has developed, first become clearly visible inTill Eulenspiegel. There, however, it remains puregaminerie; it does not clash with the nature of the subject, and the jovial, youthful spirits and the happy inventiveness of the composer carry it off. But afterwards it often assumes an unpleasant form. There are one or two things inDon Quixotethat amuse us a little at first but afterwards become rather tiresome, as over-insistence on the purely physical grotesque always does in time. InEin Heldenlebena drama that is mostly worked out on a high spiritual plane is vulgarized by the crude physical horror of the brutal battle scene, and by the now well-nigh pointless humor of the ugly 'Adversaries' section. There are pettinesses and sillinesses in theSymphonia Domesticathat one can hardly understand a man of Strauss's eminence troubling to put on paper. Altogether, we may say of the Strauss ofthe instrumental works alone—we can certainly say it of the later Strauss of the operas—that he is, in Romain Rolland's phrase, a curious compound of 'mud, débris, and genius.' Always he is a spirit at war with itself; sometimes he seems cursed, like an obverse of Goethe's Mephistopheles, to will the good and work the ill. But he has enriched program music with a large fund of new ideas, and given it a new direction and a new technique. He has established, more thoroughly than any other composer, the right of poetic instrumental music to a place by the side of abstract music. He has attempted things that were thought impossible in music, sometimes failing, but more often than not succeeding extraordinarily.
His workmanship is equal to his invention; of him at any rate the post-classicists can never say, as they said half a century ago of Liszt and his school, that he writes literary music because he lacks the self-discipline and the skill necessary for success in the abstract forms. If anything his technique, especially his orchestral technique, is too astounding; it tempts him to do amazing but unnecessary things for the mere sake of doing them. But with all his faults he is a colossus of sorts; he bestrides modern German music as Wagner did that of half a century ago. In wealth and variety of emotion and in power of graphic utterance his work as a whole is beyond comparison with that of any other contemporary composer.
The life of Strauss overlaps that of his great post-classical antithesis Brahms by thirty-three years, and by thirty-six years that of Anton Bruckner (1824-1896), a symphonist who is still little known, and that for two reasons. In the first place, his works are as a rule excessively long; in the second place, he had the misfortuneto live in Vienna, where the Brahms partisans were at one time all-powerful. Some of them resented the pretensions of another symphonist to comparison with their own idol, and by innuendo and neglect, rather than by direct attack, they contrived to diffuse a legend that has maintained itself almost down to our own day, that Bruckner was merely an amiable old gentleman with a passion for writing symphonies, but one who need not be taken too seriously. As a matter of fact, he was a good deal more than that. There is no necessity to flaunt a defiant Brucknerian banner in the face of the Brahmsians, but there is every necessity to say that great as Brahms was he by no means exhausted the possibilities of the modern symphony, and that several of the possibilities that he left untouched were turned to excellent use by Bruckner.
Bruckner's life was remarkably circumscribed and offers practically no interest to a biographer. The son of a country schoolmaster in Ansfelden, Upper Austria (where he was born Sept. 4, 1824), he spent his early life following in his father's footsteps, first at Windhag (near Freistadt), later at St. Florian, where he also filled a temporary post as organist. By his own efforts he became highly proficient on that instrument and in counterpoint. This fact and his constant connection with the church influenced his creative work strongly. In 1855 he became cathedral organist at Linz, meantime studying counterpoint with Sechter in Vienna, where he later (1867) became his master's successor as court organist. He also studied composition with Otto Kitzler in 1861-63. Aside from his activities as professor of organ, counterpoint and composition at the Vienna Conservatory and as lecturer on music at the Vienna University, this constitutes the outward record of his career. He died in Vienna, Oct. 11, 1896.
Similarly devoid of variety in their classification are his compositions—besides his nine symphonies, uponwhich his reputation rests, there are only three masses (D minor, 1864; E minor, 1869; F minor, 1872) and a few more sacred works (including the '150th Psalm'); four compositions for men's chorus accompanied (GermanenzugandHelgoland, with orchestra;Das hohe LiedandMitternacht, with piano); some othersa cappella, and one string quartet. Mostly works of large calibre and commensurately broad in conception.
The error is still frequently made—it was an error that did him much harm in anti-Wagnerian Vienna during his lifetime—of regarding Bruckner as one who tried to translate Wagner into terms of the symphony. For Wagner, indeed, he had a passionate admiration; but his own affinities as a composer with Wagner are so trifling as to be negligible. The real heirs of Wagner are the men who, like Strauss, aim at making purely instrumental music a vehicle for the expression of definite poetic ideas—whose symphonic poems are really operas without words, with the orchestra as the actors. Bruckner, even with Liszt's example before him, passed the symphonic poem by on the other side. His nine symphonies are almost as purely 'abstract' music as those of Brahms; if one qualifies the comparison with an 'almost' it is not because Bruckner worked upon anything even remotely resembling a program, but because the rather sudden transitions here and there in the symphonies, lacking as they do a strictly logical musical connection, are apt to suggest that the composer had in his mind some more or less definite extra-musical symbol. But this explanation of the undeniable fact that there is more than one hiatus in the Bruckner movements, though it is not an impossible one, is not the most probable one in every case.
A certain disconnectedness was almost inevitable in such a symphonic method as that of Bruckner. He had no appetite for the merely formal 'working-out' that Brahms could manipulate with such facility, but frequentlywithout convincing us that he is saying anything very germane to his main topic. For a frank recognition of Brahms' general mastery of form is not incompatible with an equally frank recognition that too often formalism was master of him. The danger of a transmitted classical technique in any art is that now and then it tempts its practitioners to talk—and allows them to talk quite fluently—when they have really nothing of vital importance to say. Take, as an example, bars 58-73 of the first movement of Brahms' fourth symphony. This passage is not merely dull; it is absolutely meaningless. It carries the immediately preceding thought no further; it is no manner of necessary preparation for the thought that comes immediately after. It is 'padding' pure and simple; a mechanical manipulation of the clay without any clear idea on the part of the potter as to what he wishes to model. Brahms, in fact, knows, or half-knows, that he has travelled as far as he can go along one road, and has a little time to wait before etiquette permits him to proceed up another: so he marks time with the best grace he can—or, to vary the illustration, having said all he can think of in connection with A, and not being due just yet to discuss B, he simply goes on talking until he can think of something to say. Such a passage as this would have been impossible for Beethoven: his rigorously logical mind would have rejected it as being a mere inorganic patch upon the flesh of a living organism: he would never have rested until he had re-established the momentarily interrupted flow of vital blood between the severed parts.
For a mechanical technique such as Brahms uses here, Bruckner had no liking, nor would it have been of much use in connection with ideas like his. In his general attitude towards the symphony he reminds us somewhat of Schubert. He does not start, as Brahms does, with a subject that, however admirable it may bein itself, and however excellently it may be adapted for the germination of fresh matter from it, has obviously been chosen in some degree because of its 'workableness.' With Bruckner, as with Schubert, the subject sings out at once simply because it must. The composer is too full of the immediate warmth of the idea to premeditate 'development' of it. So it inevitably comes about that, with both Bruckner and Schubert, repetition takes, in some degree, the place of development. Symphonic development, speaking broadly, becomes technically easier in proportion as the thematic matter to be manipulated is shorter; looking at the music for the moment as a mere piece of tissue-weaving, it is evident that more permutations and combinations can easily be made out of a theme like that of the first subject of Beethoven's fifth symphony than out of the main theme of Liszt'sTasso, or the Francesca theme in Tschaikowsky'sFrancesca da Rimini. Wagner, with his keen symphonic sense, gradually realized this; whereas the leit-motifs of his early works are, as a rule, fairly lengthy melodies, those of his later works are of a pregnant brevity. The reason for this change of style was that, as he came to see more and more clearly the possibilities of a symphonic development of the orchestral voice in opera, he saw also that the interweaving of themes would be at once closer and more elastic if the motifs themselves were made shorter.
This generic musical fact is the explanation of much of the formal unsatisfactoriness of the average symphonic poem. If the object of the poetic musician is to depict a character, he will need a fairly wide sweep of melodic outline. We could not, for example, suggest Hamlet or Faust in a theme so short and simple as that of the first subject of theEroica, or the first subject of the Second Symphony of Brahms—to say nothing of the 'Fate' theme of Beethoven's Fifth. But the wide-stretching poetic theme pays for its psychologicalsuggestiveness by sacrificing, in most cases, its 'workableness.' And composers have only latterly learned how to overcome this disability by constructing the big, character-drawing theme on a sort of fishing-rod principle, with detachable parts. It takes Strauss nearly one hundred and twenty bars in which to draw the full portrait of his hero in the splendid opening section ofEin Heldenleben; but various pieces of the chief theme can be used at will later so as to suggest some transformation of mood in the hero, or some change in his circumstances. The curious falling figure in the third bar of the work, for example, that at first conveys an idea of headlong energy, afterwards becomes a roar of pain and rage (full score, pp. 118 ff, and elsewhere). Had Liszt had the imagination to hit upon such a device as this, and the technique to manipulate it, he might have given to the 'development' of his symphonic poems something of the organic life that Strauss has infused into his.
Bruckner also lacked, in the main, this knowledge of how to work upon sweeping ideas that were conceived primarily for purely expressive rather than 'developmental' purposes, and at the same time to make either the whole theme or various fragments of it plastic factors in the evolution of an organically-knit texture. If Brahms would have been none the worse for a little of that quality in Bruckner that made it impossible for him to talk unless he had something to say, Bruckner would have been all the better for a little of Brahms' gift of making the most of whatever fragment of material he was using at the moment. When Bruckner attempts 'development' in the scholastic sense, as in bars 300 ff of the first movement of the third symphony, he is almost always awkward and unconvincing. His logic—and a logic of his own he certainly had—was less formal than poetic; as one gets to know the symphonies better one is surprised to findemotional continuity coming into many a passage that had previously appeared a trifle incoherent. His musical logic is just the logic of any true and spontaneous thing said simply, naturally and feelingly.
While it is true in one sense that Bruckner's methods and outlook remained the same in each of his nine published symphonies (the ninth, by the way, was left uncompleted at his death), in another sense it puts a false complexion on the truth. We do not find in him any such growth—discernible in the texture not less than in the manner—as we do from the First Symphony to the Ninth of Beethoven, or from theRienzito theParsifalof Wagner. In externals, and to some extent in essentials also, Bruckner's method and manner are the same throughout his life—the wide-spun imaginative first movement, the thoughtfuladagio, the wild or merryscherzo, the rather sprawlingfinale. But there was a real evolution of the intensive kind; and in the last three symphonies in particular everything has become enormouslyvertieft. In the ninth, Bruckner often attains to a Beethovenian profundity and pregnancy. His greatest fault is his inability to concentrate: his material is almost invariably excellent, but he is too prodigal with it. He is not content with two or three main ideas, that in themselves would constitute material enough for a movement; to these he needs to add episodes of all kinds, until the movement expands to a size that makes listening to it a physical strain, and renders it difficult for the mind to grasp the true proportions of it. This is generally the case with his first and last movements; not even the titanic power of conception in movements like the finale of his fifth and eighth symphonies, nor the extraordinary technical mastery they show, can quite reconcile us to their length and apparent diffuseness. His most expressive work is frequently to be found in his adagios, though there, too, his method is at times so leisurely that in spite of the fine quality of the material and the depth of feeling in the music, it is sometimes hard to maintain one's interest in it to the end. In hisscherzihe is more conciliatory to the average listener. Here he is incontestably nearer to Beethoven than Brahms ever came in movements of this type. In place of the charming but rather irrelevant quasi-pastorals with which Brahms is content for the scherzi of his symphonies, Bruckner writes movements overflowing with vitality, a veritable riot of rhythmic energy. He will never be popular in the concert room; his excessive length and his frequent diffuseness are against that. But to musicians he will always be one of the most interesting figures in nineteenth-century music—a composer fertile in ideas of a noble kind, an imaginative artist with the power of evoking moods of a refined and moving poetry. And certainly there is no contrast more remarkable in the whole history of music than that between the quiet, embarrassed, unlettered recluse that was the man Bruckner, and the volcano of passion that was the musician. Undoubtedly he has the great hand, and at times he can shake the world with it as Beethoven did with his. His place is between Beethoven and Schubert: with each of his hands he holds a hand of theirs.
The third big figure among the representatives of the modern 'poetic' school is Gustav Mahler. Like the other two, he is of the 'southern wing'; like Bruckner's, his training was Viennese. Born in Kalischt (Bohemia), he went to the capital as a student in the university and the conservatory. Already at twenty he began that brilliant career as conductor which during his lifetime somewhat overshadowed his recognition as a creative artist. His first post was at Hall (Upper Austria), where he conducted a theatre orchestra; thence he went to Laibach, Olmütz, Kassel (asVereinsdirigent); thence to Prague as conductor of the German National Theatre (1885). In 1886 he substituted for Nikisch at the Leipzig opera; two years later he became opera conductor in Budapest, 1891 in Hamburg, and 1897 returned to Vienna, first as conductor, soon after to become director of the Royal Opera, where he remained till 1907. During 1898-1900 he conducted the Philharmonic concerts as well. In 1909 he came to New York as conductor of the Philharmonic Society and remained till 1911, when failing health, perhaps aggravated by uncongenial conditions, forced him to resign. He died shortly after his return to Vienna, in the same year.