It has
become a formidable engine of steel and gold, vibrant with mad and
unexpected things. Patterns leap and tumble out of it. Violin music
launches swiftly into space, trumpets run scales, the tempi move with
the velocity of 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,
even more than what he had already definitely accomplished, that 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
Brahms 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 had 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.
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