The Diversions of a Music-Lover (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II RICHARD STRAUSS " Beware," wrote a French essayist, " of irrevocably condemning what our grandchildren are very likely to applaud." It really looks as if some of our excellent critics had taken this admirable warning almost too deeply to heart. Twice bit thrice shy. The intelligent amateurs of to-day are so morbidly anxious to prove their penetration, and avoid the mistake which their fathers and grandfathers made over Wagner, and their great-grandfathers over Beethoven, that they are more likely to mistake talent, or even charlatanry, for genius than vice versa. Rather than stultify themselves by failing to recognise the real thing, they are ready to hail a new lineal descendant of Wagner or Beethoven once every five years. A few years ago the output of inspired composers was entirely supplied byItaly,?Mascagni, Leoncavallo, Puccini, Perosi. In the latest and most formidable product, grande et conspicuum nostro quoque tempore monstrum, Richard Strauss, Germany once more asserts her pre-eminence. A few cautious and inhospitable voices, it is true, have been raised in protest against the chorus of acclamation with which his works have been greeted in our midst, but they have been practically overborne by the more strident accents of eulogy. This is, after all, only what might be expected. Richard Strauss is pre-eminently the dernier cri in instrumental music,?louder, more strenuous, more complex, more rebellious than any of his predecessors, owing much to Wagner (compared with whom he occupies a position somewhat similar to that in which Gorky stands to Tolstoy), yet not only associating himself with the philosophy of Wagner's most irreverent assailant, Nietzsche, but boldly transgressing the principles laid down with such admirable clearness by Wagner himself:? " When ...