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By Root 1056 0

” Called tone poems, the compositions were rather condensed operas without words. At the premiere of Don Juan the audience called the composer back five times in an effort to make him play the piece all over again. At the premiere of Heldenleben, the passage depicting battle enraged some listeners to the point of leaving the hall and caused others to “tremble as they listened while some stood up suddenly and made violent gestures quite unconsciously.” If to some Strauss was a sensationalist and corrupter of the pure art of music and to others the prophet of a new musical age, even the “inventor of a new art,” one thing was clear: he retained for Germany the supremacy of music which had culminated in Wagner. He was “Richard II.”

In one sense this made him the most important man in German cultural life, for music was the only sphere in which foreigners willingly acknowledged the superiority that Germans believed was self-evident. German Kultur in German eyes was the heir of Greece and Rome and they themselves the best educated and most cultivated of modern peoples, yet foreigners in their appreciation of this fact fell curiously short of perfect understanding. Apart from German professors and philosophers, only Wagner excited their homage, only Bayreuth, seat of the Wagner Festspielhaus, attracted their visits. Paris remained Europe’s center of the arts, pleasure and fashion, London of Society, Rome of antiquity and Italy the lure of travelers seeking sun and beauty. The new movements and impulses in literature—Naturalism, Symbolism, Social criticism; the towering figures—Tolstoy, Ibsen and Zola; the great novels from Dostoyevsky to Hardy: all originated outside Germany. England after its great Victorian age was again in the nineties pulsing with new talent—Stevenson, Wilde and Shaw, Conrad, Wells, Kipling and Yeats. Russia again produced in Chekhov a matchless interpreter of man. Painters bloomed in France. Germany in painting had little but Max Liebermann, leader of the Secessionists, whose secession, however, took him no further than the presidency of the Prussian Academy of Fine Arts. In literature her outstanding figures were the playwright Gerhart Hauptmann, an offshoot of Ibsen, and the poet Stefan George, an offshoot of Baudelaire and Mallarmé.

In music, however, Germany had produced the world’s masters and seen the procession crowned by Wagner whose dogma of a fusion of the arts became a cult in which foreigners eagerly joined. Wagner Societies from St. Petersburg to Chicago contributed funds to provide the Master’s music dramas with a fitting home, and the “Bayreuth Idea” created intellectual ferment beyond Germany’s borders. Germans believed their sovereignty of music would continue forever without serious challenge from any other country. While many of them, like the Kaiser, detested Strauss’s modernity, his pre-eminence appeared to them happy proof that German musical supremacy was maintained.

Not only the major cities but every German city or town of substantial size had its opera house, concert hall, music academy, orchestral society and musical Verein of one kind or another. Hardly a German did not belong to a choral society or instrumental ensemble and spend his evenings practicing Bach cantatas over several steins of beer. Frankfurt-am-Main, a town of under 200,000 in the nineties, about the size of The Hague, Nottingham or Minneapolis, boasted two colleges of music, with distinguished teaching staffs and pupils from many countries, a new opera house, “one of the handsomest in Europe,” which gave performances six nights a week, a Museum Society Orchestra of 120 players which gave concerts of symphonic and chamber music, two large choral societies also prolific in concerts, and in addition was host to numerous recitals by visiting artists. Besides activity of comparable kind in Berlin, Munich, Cologne, Dresden, Leipzig, Stuttgart and other cities, music festivals lasting as much as a week in honor of some composer or special occasion were held widely and often.

The season at Bayreuth since Wagner’s death