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assurance” and the “mad rhythm that sweeps us along from beginning to end and forces us to share in the hero’s pranks.” What impressed him most about Heldenleben, which he also heard in 1903, was its “cyclonic energy.” The listener is no longer master of his emotions: “I say again that it is impossible to withstand his irresistible domination.” Debussy’s own orchestral prelude, L’Après-midi d’un Faune, based on Mallarmé’s poem, and his Nocturnes for orchestra, which appeared in the nineties, led Strauss to return the compliment. Debussy was “a remarkable and altogether unique genius,” he said, “within his own limited domain.”

Strauss was always rather surprised when someone else produced work of high quality. “I had no idea that anyone except myself was capable of writing such good music as this,” he remarked “charmingly and characteristically” to Beecham on hearing a work of Delius. He never listened to Puccini and did not know Manon from Tosca, or Butterfly from Bohème, although Puccini’s works were exactly contemporary with his own. Italian opera was not highly regarded in Germany. He was generous, however, in performing the works of other contemporaries. Unable to conduct modern music at the Berlin Royal Opera while the Kaiser’s taste held sway, he founded an orchestra of his own, the Tonkünstler, to encourage “progressive principles” in music. Subsidized by private patrons, the Tonkünstler played all Liszt’s tone poems in chronological order as well as Strauss’s own works and introduced to Berlin performances of Tchaikovsky, Bruckner, Hugo Wolf, Elgar and, if not Debussy, at least his predecessors, Charpentier and d’Indy. Once in London on a visit to the National Gallery in company with Edgar Speyer and Edward Elgar, the group stopped in front of Tintoretto’s “St. George and the Dragon” while Speyer remarked, “Here we have a revolutionary who broke ground at the very end of the glorious Venetian period. Shall we say that Tintoretto was to painting what our friend Richard Strauss is today to music?” Much struck by this remark, Strauss returned to the painting on their way back through the rooms, studied it again and exclaimed, “Speyer is right. I am the Tintoretto of music!”

From this height he could afford, and did not stint, encouragement of less renowned colleagues. On hearing a performance in Düsseldorf in 1902 of Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, based on a poem by Cardinal Newman, Strauss proposed a toast “to the welfare and success of the first English Progressive, Meister Edward Elgar, and of the young progressive school of English composers.” Such tribute from Strauss startled the musical world and aroused the usual critics’ uproar which it amused him to provoke. Though disliking the terms of the compliment all England was impressed and flattered. Strauss was no less appreciative of the ultramodern Schönberg, whose experiments in atonality so impressed him that he arranged for the young composer to be given the Liszt Fellowship and appointment as Professor of Composition in the Stern Academy in Berlin. On the occasion of the premiere of Mahler’s Third Symphony in Cologne in 1902, Strauss decided its success by going up to the platform and applauding ostentatiously. From 1900 on, as president of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein, founded by Liszt, he invited foreign composers to conduct their new works at the Society’s festivals. Sibelius, whom he invited to present his Swan of Tuonela in 1900, found him “extraordinarily amiable.” When Strauss himself took the podium at these concerts he was greeted by the orchestra with a threefold fanfare and by the audience rising to its feet.

In England and the United States his renown was large and his appearances lionized. A Strauss Festival lasting three days was held in London in 1903 at which all his works from Aus Italien to Heldenleben were played. Strauss liked the English “very much,” as he once told Rolland. For one thing they made traveling comfortable in places like Egypt, so that “you can always be sure of finding clean rooms and modern conveniences.” For Strauss