Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [202]
In Heldenleben, however, convinced admirers began to detect evidence of a deep-seated flaw in the composer. Ernest Newman believed Strauss had enriched music with more new ideas than anyone since Wagner and had “put into music a greater energy, a greater stress of feeling and a greater weight of thinking than any other composer of the day.” Yet he did not seem able to restrain an unworthy desire to “stagger humanity.” His technical facility and command over ideas was such that he could do anything he wanted and there was no limit to his inventiveness, but he could not keep it within bounds. Newman would willingly have left the hall during the “sniggering, snarling and grunting” of the Adversaries in Heldenleben, which he considered “freak” music like the sheep in Don Quixote. He felt a failure of taste, a streak of vulgarity in a man willing to spoil “two of the finest scores of the Nineteenth Century” with such “monstrosities” as these. Such reactions merely stimulated Strauss to further freaks as a sign of his contempt for what were claimed to be the “eternal” laws of beauty in music. The fact that he insisted on making the critics pay for their seats, causing “screams of agony” all over the Continent, did not help matters.
To the younger critics Strauss’s discords and dissonances were not as distressing as his freaks. Lawrence Gilman, an American, thought the dissonance of the Battle music, like that depicting the mental confusion of Don Quixote, was “eloquent and meaningful” and quite different from that other kind achieved, as Whistler said, “by the simple expedient of sitting on the keyboard.” Apart from the freaks there were enough marvels of music in Strauss’s work to have put him above the sneers and carping; it was the non-musical aspect of his work—that is, the didactic realism of his program notes—which kept him in the center of critical furor. In the same spirit in which Philip Ernst, having omitted the tree from his picture, decided it must be cut down, Strauss insisted on painting the tree and then hanging a sign on it saying, “This is a tree.” As a result critics leaped to take issue, as when Newman said of a trombone passage in Zarathustra labeled “Disgust,” which followed “Delights and Passions,” that “it no more suggests disgust than it does the toothache.” It was no defence by his friends to insist that Strauss wanted his music to be listened to as music and that he added the program notes only under the urgent pressure of colleagues and publishers. An artist certain of his standards would not have made the concession and in any case the literary labels were in his mind and scribbled on his scores when he composed.
In France Claude Debussy, too, was writing descriptive music. Rather than literal and narrative, like that of Strauss, it was elusive and shimmering, after the manner of the Impressionists in painting and the Symbolists in poetry. The Symbolist credo was to suggest, not to name, an object. Where Strauss stated, Debussy suggested. “If people insist on wanting to understand what happens in a symphonic poem, we may as well give up writing them,” he said. Literal meaning was a matter of equal unconcern to Sibelius. When asked by a friend alter listening to a recording of his Fourth Symphony what it really meant, he said after a short pause, “Play the record again.”
Debussy, however, admired Strauss, who was two years his junior, and acknowledged that the Verklärung (Transfiguration) in Tod und Verklärung “takes place before our very eyes.” When he heard Till Eulenspiegel in 1903 he thought its flouting of musical laws amounted almost “to an hour of music in a lunatic asylum.… You do not know whether to roar with laughter or groan with pain and you are filled with wonder when you find anything in its customary place.” Nevertheless he thought it a work of “genius” and was awed by its “amazing orchestral