"Mazeppa." It is Lenau's hero himself, the particular being Don Juan Tenorio. The vibrant, brilliant music of the up-surging, light-treading strings, of the resonant, palpitating brass, springs forth in virile march, reveals the man himself, his physical glamour, his intoxication that caused him to see in every woman the Venus, and that in the end made him the victim as well as the hero of the sexual life. It is Till Eulenspiegel himself, the scurvy, comic rascal, the eternal dirty little boy with his witty and obscene gestures, who leers out of every measure of the tone-poem named for him, and twirls his fingers at his nose's end at all the decorous and respectable world. Here, for once, orchestral music is really wonderfully rascally and impudent, horns gleeful and windy and insolent, wood-wind puckish and obscene. Here a musical form reels hilariously and cuts capers and dances on bald heads. The variation of "Don Quixote" that describes with wood-wind and tambourine Dulcinea del Toboso is plump and plebeian and good-natured with her very person, is all the more trenchantly vulgar and flat for the preceding suave variation that describes the knight's fair, sonorous dream of her. There is no music more plaintively stupid than that which in the same work figures the "sheep" against which Don Quixote battles so valiantly. Nor is there any music more maliciously, malevolently petty than that which represents the adversaries in "Ein Heldenleben." So exceedingly definite is the portrait of the Hero's Consort, for which Frau Richard Strauss, without doubt, sat, that without even having seen a photograph of the lady, one can aver that she is graced with a diatonic figure. And, certainly the most amusing passage of "Sinfonia Domestica" is that complex of Bavarian lustihood, Bavarian grossness, Bavarian dreaminess and Bavarian good nature, the thematic group that serves as autoportrait of the composer.

And just as there seemed few characters that Strauss could not paint, in those days, so, too, there seemed few situations, few atmospheres, to which he could not do justice. A couple of measures, the sinister palpitation of the timpani and the violas, the brooding of the wood-wind, the dull flickering of the flutes, the laboring breath of the strings, and we are lying on the death-bed, exhausted and gasping for air, weighed by the wrecks of hopes, awaiting the cruel blows on the heart that will end everything. Horns and violins quaver and snarl, flutes shrill, a brief figure descends in the oboes and clarinets, and Till has shed his rascal-sweat and danced on the air. The orchestra reveals us Don Juan's love affairs in all their individuality: first the passionate, fiery relation with the Countess, quickly begun and quickly ended; then the gentler and more inward communion with Anna, with the boredom resulting from the lady's continual demand for sentiment and romantic posturing; then the great night of love and roses, with its intoxicated golden winding horns, its ecstatically singing violins; and finally the crushing disappointment, the shudder of disgust. The battle in "Ein Heldenleben" pictures war really; the whistling, ironical wind-machine in "Don Quixote" satirizes dreams bitingly as no music has done; the orchestra describes the enthusiastic Don recovering from his madness, and smiles a conclusion; in "Also Sprach Zarathustra" it piles high the tomes of science, and waltzes with the Superman in distant worlds.

And then, though less fecund an inventor than Liszt, less rich and large a temperament than Berlioz, Strauss was better able than either of his masters to organize his material on difficult and original lines, and find musical forms representative of his programs. Because of their labors, he was born freer of the classical traditions than they had been, and was able to make music plot more exactly the curves of his concepts, to submit the older forms, such as the rondo and the theme and variations, more perfectly to his purpose. Compositions of the sort of "Till Eulenspiegel," "Tod und Verklärung" and "Ein Heldenleben," solidly made and yet both narrative and dramatic, place the symphonic poem in the category of legitimate musical forms. The themes of "Till" grow out of each other quite as do the themes of a Beethoven symphony or of "Tristan" or of "Parsifal." Indeed, Strauss has done for the symphonic poem something of what Wagner did for the opera. And not an overwhelming number of classical symphonies contain music more eloquent than, say, the "sunrise" in "Also Sprach Zarathustra," or the final variation of "Don Quixote" with its piercing, shattering trumpets of defeat, or the terrifying opening passage of "Tod und Verklärung." For Strauss was able to unloose his verve and fantasy completely in the construction of his edifices. His orchestra moves in strangest and most unconventional curves, shoots with the violence of an exploding firearm, ambles like a palfrey, swoops like a bird. There are few who, at a first hearing of a Strauss poem, do not feel as though some wild and troubling and panic presence had leaned over the concert hall and bedeviled the orchestra. For, in his hands, it is no longer the familiar and terrorless thing it once had been, a thing about whose behavior one can be certain. It has become a formidable engine of steel and gold, vibrant with mad and unexpected things. Patterns leap and tumble out of it. Violin music launches swiftly into space, trumpets run scales, the tempi move with the velocity of express trains. It has become a giant, terrible bird, the great auk of music, that seizes you in its talons and spirals into the empyrean.

But it was what he seemed to promise to perform, to bring into being, even more than what he had already definitely accomplished, that spread about the figure of Strauss the peculiar radiance. It was Nietzsche who had made current the dream of a new music, a music that should be fiercely and beautifully animal, full of laughter, of the dry good light of the intellect, of "salt and fire and the great, compelling logic, of the light feet of the south, the dance of the stars, the quivering dayshine of the Mediterranean." The other composers, the Beethovens and Brahms and Wagners, had been sad, suffering, wounded men, men who had lost their divine innocence and joy in the shambles, and whose spiritual bodies were scarred, for all the muscular strength gained during their fights, by hunger and frustration and agony. Pain had even marred their song. For what should have been innocence and effortless movement and godlike joy, Mozartean coordination and harmony, was full of terrible cries, and convulsive, rending motions, and shrouding sorrow. And Nietzsche had dreamt of music of another sort. He had dreamt of a music that should be a bridge to the Superman, the man whose every motion would be carefree. He had seen striding across mountain chains in the bright air of an eternal morning a youth irradiant with unbroken energy, before whom all the world lay open in vernal sunshine like a domain before its lord. He had seen one beside whom the other musicians would stand as convicts from Siberian prison camps who had stumbled upon a banquet of the gods. He had seen a young Titan of music, drunken with life and fire and joy, dancing and reeling and laughing on the top of the world, and with fingers amid the stars, sending suns and constellations crashing. He had caught sight of the old and eternally youthful figure of Indian Dionysos.

And even though Strauss himself could scarcely be mistaken for the god, nevertheless he made Nietzsche's dream appear realizable. He permitted one for an instant to perceive a musical realm in which the earth-fast could not breathe. He permitted one for an instant to hear ringing "the prelude of a deeper, mightier, perchance a