THE DIAL
FEBRUARY 1920
RICHARD STRAUSS
STRAUSS was never the fine, the perfect artist. Even in the first flare of youth, even at the time when he was the meteoric dazzling figure flaunting over all the bald pates of the universe the standard of the musical future, it was apparent that there were serious flaws in his spirit. Despite the audacity with which he realized his amazing and poignant and ironic visions, despite his youthful fire and exuberance—and it was as something of a golden youth of music that Strauss burst upon the world—one sensed in him the not quite beautifully deepened man, heard at moments a callow and plebeian accent in his eloquence, felt that an unmistakable alloy was fused with the generous gold. The purity, the inwardness, the searchings of the heart, the great religious sentiment of beauty, present so unmistakably in the art of the great men who had developed music, were wanting in his work. He had neither the unswerving sense of style, nor the felicity of touch, that mark the perfect craftsman. He was not a scrupulous or exacting artist. It was apparent that he was careless, too easily contented with thematic material, not always happy in his detail. Mixed with his fire there was a sort of laziness and indifference. But, in those days, Strauss was unmistakably the genius, the original and bitingly expressive musician, the enginer of proud orchestral flights, the outrider and bannerman of his art, and one forgave his shortcomings because of the radiance of his figure, or remained only half-conscious of them.
For, once his period of apprenticeship passed, and all desire to write symphonies and chamber music in the styles of Schumann and Mendelssohn and Brahms, to construct operas after the pattern of
