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parents’ happiness, the quarrels of aunts and uncles over family resemblances—“Just like his Papa!” “Just like his Mama!”—and similar stuff. Although there was tender melody of Strauss’s finest in the cradle song and love duet, the dominant impression is of thumping and screaming and raucous confusion suggesting a maddened circus. If this is German home life, German history becomes understandable. Even longer than Heldenleben, the work astonished and offended most listeners. “If all the sacred elephants in India were driven into the Ganges at the same moment,” said a renowned but unnamed conductor to Beecham when the piece was played in London some months later, “they could not have made half as much noise as that one little Bavarian baby in its bath.” Gurgling bath water and ringing alarm clock were not what Wagner had meant by “the stuff of music.” The vulgarity of the new century seemed suddenly confirmed by its most eminent composer. Strauss missed the point. “I do not see why I should not compose a Symphony about myself,” he told Rolland. “I find myself quite as interesting as Napoleon or Alexander.”

His choice of two world conquerors was indicative. In music the German assumption of superiority was by this time beginning to annoy other peoples. “German musicians always put a German arrival on a pedestal so that they can idolise it,” wrote Grieg to Delius in 1903. “Wagner is dead but they must have something to satisfy their patriotism and they would rather have ersatz than nothing at all.” In 1905 at a music festival in Strasbourg, capital of formerly French, now German, Alsace, the stated purpose was to bring French and Germans together through art. In a three-day program, however, only two French works were performed, while the first day of concerts began with Weber and ended with Wagner, the second day was devoted to Brahms, Mahler and Strauss and the last day entirely to Beethoven. The selection from Wagner of the last scene from Die Meistersinger, in which Hans Sachs denounces foreign insincerity and trivolity, suggested to one auditor a certain “lack of courtesy.”

The world’s increasing irritation with Germany appeared in the eagerness with which foreign critics seized upon evidence of a decline in Strauss’s inspiration. Everyone jumped on Sinfonia Domestica. Newman was astonished that “a composer of genius should have fallen so low” and Gilman revealed the degree to which Germany was getting on the nerves of other nations. Quoting Matthew Arnold to the effect that Teutonism tends insistently toward the “ugly and ignoble,” he wrote that “only a Teuton with a Teuton’s failure of tact” could have contrived Domestica.

The Zeitgeist did not call for Papa, Mama and Baby. A restlessness fermenting under the superabundant materialism was producing in artists a desire to shock; to rip and slash the thick quilt of bourgeois comfort. Attuned as always, Strauss responded. Sinfonia Domestica had shocked by banality, but now he felt a need to unnerve and appall and went straight from Bavarian family life to a theme of depraved and lascivious passion—Salome, in Oscar Wilde’s version.

A drama as lush and gruesome as Wilde trying hard could make it, Salome was a pursuit of sensation for its own sake, an effort to produce what Baudelaire called “the phosphorescence of putrescence.” The original play, written in French in 1891, went into rehearsal in London a year later with Sarah Bernhardt in the title role, but performance was banned by the Lord Chamberlain on the ground that its presentation of St. John the Baptist was sacrilege. Upon publication (with copies for the author’s friends bound in “Tyrian purple and tired silver”), the play was denounced by The Times as “an arrangement in blood and ferocity, morbid, bizarre, repulsive and very offensive.” In 1894 an English translation by Lord Alfred Douglas appeared, illustrated with luscious evil by the truest decadent of them all, Aubrey Beardsley. Three of his drawings, considered indecent by the publishers, had to be withdrawn. In 1896, when Wilde was in Reading Gaol, Salome