engrossed in the weaving of a musical pattern fairly extraneous to his idea. The Faust Symphony is, after all, an exception. Berlioz, too, failed on the whole to achieve the musical novel. Whenever he did attain musical form, it was generally at the expense of his programme. Are the somewhat picturesque episodes of Harold in Italy, whatever their virtues—and they are many—anything but vaguely related to the Byronisms that ostensibly elemented them? The surprisingly conventional overture to King Lear makes one feel as though Berlioz had sat through a performance of one of Shakespeare's comedies under the impression that he was assisting at the tragedy, so unrelated to its subject is the music. And where, on the other hand, Berlioz did succeed in being regardful of his programme, as in the Symphonie Fantastique, or in Lelio, there resulted a somewhat thin and formless music, a music without much intrinsic value.
But Strauss, benefiting by the experiments of his two predecessors, realized the new form better than any one before him had done. For he possessed the special gifts necessary to the performance of the task. He possessed, in the first place, a miraculous power of musical characterization. Through the representative nicety of his themes, through his inordinate capacity for thematic variation and transformation, his playful and witty and colourful instrumentation, Strauss was able to impart to his music a concreteness and descriptiveness and realism hitherto unknown to symphonic art, to characterize briefly, sparingly, justly, a personage, a situation, an event. He could be pathetic, ironic, playful, mordant, musing, at will. He was sure in his tone, was low-German in Till Eulenspiegel, courtly and brilliant in Don Juan, noble and bitterly sarcastic in Don Quixote, childlike in Tod und Verklirung. His orchestra was able to accommodate itself to all the folds and curves of his elaborate programmes, to find equivalents for individual traits. It is not simply "a man," nor even "an amatory hero," that is portrayed in Don Juan. It is no vague symbol for the poet of the sort created by Orpheus or Tasso or 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 with a lithe, 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
