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weight to the second. I had also decided to remove my subject from the pathetic and psychological sphere into the fantastic and decorative by prescribing costumes of the late Renaissance, after Tintoretto or Paolo Veronese. With Swinburne and Aubrey Beardsley I consider anachronism an excellent element of later-day art; although I am perfectly aware that the painters at the end of the sixteenth century were prompted by naïveté to dress their Biblical characters in contemporary costumes, and that when we do this the process is anything in the world but naïve. Still, it seems to me infinitely more charming and important to attain a certain internal consistency of the theatrical art-product than to satisfy the literally historical requirements of some Philistines in the audience. And just such an internal consistency actually does connect the music of Richard Strauss—which is plainly the last magnificent expression of a great musical epoch—with the painting of those Venetians who, on their own score, give us a magnificent, over-ripe finale to a very great age. I recall some words Strauss said to me, not before a Veronese, but before a Solimena, in other words before one of the greatest painters of the seventeenth century, where this element of the over-ripe stands out with even stronger emphasis. I know the picture, in the gallery of Count Harrach in Vienna, truly the most beautiful Solimena in existence. I know the season; we stepped out into a raw day of early spring. But I no longer have the faintest idea of the year of this conversation. After standing before the picture for a long time—he has a marked feeling for painting and architecture; and the old inimical opposition of the German music-maker to "ocular art" seems in him, characteristically, to be broken down or even converted into love—Strauss said to me, "Isn't that like my Salomé? Very beautiful and full of contrasts, but the instrumentation a bit overdone!" In any case, the work acquired something colourfully sonorous and representative by the stressing of this internal consistency; to which one might add as an even deeper harmony the atmosphere of Vienna which, with its showy palaces, has no closer affinity to any period than the genuinely and pompously baroque. This work is representative in the same sense that Strawinsky's Sacre du Printemps is representative, in the highest degree, of diametrically opposite attitudes and forces in European art. It has affected the public considerably both here and in other big cities, and has met with great success.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal