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, that, even more than what he had already definitely accomplished, 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 Brahmses 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 has 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 beautiful. 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, might stand. 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, stronger music, perhaps a more wayward and mysterious music; a music which is super-German and which, unlike other music, would not die away, nor pale, nor grow dull beside the blue and wanton sea and the clear
