inserts a syrupy air in the style of Haendel or Mehul in the first act; and follows Mozart with modern comic-opera waltzes, Haendel with post-Wagnerian incantations. And, like Hofmannsthal's libretto, the score remains a superfic1al and formless thing. The inner and coherent rhythm, the spiritual beat and swing, the great unity and direction, is wanting. "I have always wanted to write an opera like Mozart's, and now I have done it," Strauss is reported to have said after the first performance of Der Rosenkavalier. But Der Rosenkavalier is almost antipodal to Don Giovanni or to Falstaff or to Die Meistersinger or to any of the great comic operas. For it lacks just the thing the others possess abundantly, a strong lyrical movement, a warm emotion that informs the music bar after bar, scene after scene, act after act, and imparts to the auditor the joy, the vitality, the beauty of which the composers' hearts were full. It is a long while since Strauss has felt anything of the sort.
Had the new time produced no musical art, had no Debussy nor Scriabine, no Strawinsky nor Bloch, put in appearance, one might possibly have found oneself compelled to believe the mournful decadence of Richard Strauss the inevitable development awaiting musical genius in the modern world. There exists a group, international in composition, which, above all other contemporary bodies, arrogates to itself the style of modernity. It is the group, tendrils of which reach into every great capital and centre, into every artistic movement and cause, of the bored ones, the spoilt ones. The present system has lifted into a quasi-aristocratic and leisurely state vast numbers of people without background, without tradition or culture or taste. By reason of its largeness and resources, this group of people without taste, without interest, without finesse, has come to dominate in particular the world of art as the world of play, has come to demand distraction, sensation, excitement which its false existences do not afford it. Indeed, this band has come to give a cast to the whole of present-day life, its members pretend to represent present-day culture. It is with this group, with its drained bodies and frayed sensibilities and tired pulses, that Strauss has be- come increasingly identified, till of late he has become something like its court-musician, supplying it with stimulants, awaking its curiosities, astonishing and exciting it with the superficial novelty of his works, trying to procure it the experiences it is so lamentably unable to procure itself. It is for it that he created the trumpery horrors, the
