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140 well as the hero of the sexual life. It is Till Eulenspiegel himself, the scurvy comic rascal, the eternal dirty little boy with his witty and obscene gestures, who leers out of every measure of the tone-poem named for him, and twirls his fingers at his nose's end at all the decorous and respectable world. Here, for once, orchestral music is really wonderfully rascally and impudent, horns gleeful and windy and insolent, wood-wind puckish and obscene. Here, a musical form reels hilariously and cuts capers and dances on bald heads. The variation of Don Quixote that describes with wood-wind and tambourine Dulcinea del Toboso is plump and plebeian and good-natured with her very person, is all the more trenchantly stupid and flat for the preceding suave variation that describes the knight’s fair, sonorous radiant dream of her. There is no music more plaintively stupid than that which in the same work figures the "sheep" against which Don Quixote battles so valiantly. Nor is there any music more maliciously, malevolently petty than that which represents the adversaries in Ein Heldenleben. So exceedingly definite is the portrait of the Hero's Consort, for which Frau Richard Strauss, without doubt, sat, that one can aver without even having seen a photograph of the lady that she is graced with a diatonic figure. And certainly the most amusing passage of the Sinfonia Domestica is that complex of Bavarian lustihood, Bavarian grossness, Bavarian dreaminess, and Bavarian good nature, the thematic group that Serves as autos portrait of the composer.

And just as there seemed few characters that Strauss could not paint, in those days, so too there seemed few situations, few atmospheres, to which he could not do justice. A couple of measures, the sinister palpitation of the timpani and the violas, the brooding of the wood-wind, the dull flickering of the flutes, the labouring breath of the strings, and we are lying on the death-bed, exhausted and gasping for air, weighed by the wrecks of hopes, awaiting the cruel blows on the heart that will end everything. Horns and violins quaver and snarl, flutes shrill, a brief figure descends in the oboes and clarinets, and Till has shed his rascal-sweat and danced on the air. The orchestra reveals us Don Juan's love affairs in all their individuality: first the passionate fiery relation with the Countess, quickly begun and quickly ended; then the gentler and more inward communion with Anna, with the boredom resulting from the lady's continual demand for sentiment and romantic posturing; then the great night of love