" Something
in him has bent and been fouled.
One thing at least the Strauss of the tone-poems indisputably was. He
was freely, dazzlingly, daringly expressive. And this is what the
Strauss of the last years thinly and rarely is. It is not Oscar Wilde's
wax flowers of speech, nor the excessively stiff and conventionalized
action of "Salome," that bores one with the Strauss opera of that name.
It is not even the libretto of "Der Rosenkavalier," essentially coarse
and boorish and insensitive as it is beneath all its powdered
preciosity, that wearies one with Strauss's "Musical Comedy"; or the
hybrid, lame, tasteless form of "Ariadne auf Naxos" that turns one
against that little monstrosity. It is the generally inexpressive and
insufficient music in which Strauss has vested them. The music of
"Salome," for instance, is not even commensurable with Wilde's drama. It
was the evacuation of an obsessive desire, the revulsion from a pitiless
sensuality that the poet had intended to procure through this
representation. But Strauss's music, save in such exceptional passages
as the shimmering, restless, nerve-sick opening page, or the beginning
of the scene with the head, or certain other crimson patches, hampers
and even negates the intended effect.
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