The purity, the inwardness, the searchings of the heart, the
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 weightiness of touch,
that mark the perfect craftsman. He was not sufficiently a scrupulous
and exacting artist. It was apparent that he was careless, too easily
contented with some of his 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 engineer 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 "Tannhaeuser" and
"Parsifal" gone out of him, this slender, sleepy young Bavarian with the
pale curly hair and mustaches had commenced to develop the expressive
power of music amazingly, to make the orchestra speak wonderfully as it
had never spoken before.
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