And where, on the other hand, Berlioz did succeed in being
regardful of his program, as in the "Symphonic Fantastique," or in
"Lelio," there resulted a somewhat thin and formless music.
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 colorful 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 Verklaerung." His orchestra was able to
accommodate itself to all the folds and curves of his elaborate
programs, to find equivalents for individual traits. It is not simply "a
man," or even "an amatory hero" that is portrayed in "Don Juan.
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