Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/176

144 electric, at moments winding a lazy, happy smoke-blue thread through the sunburnt fabric of the score. His horns glow with soft fruity timbres. The new sweetness of colour which he attains in his songs, the pale gold of Morgen, the rose of the Serenade, the mild evening blue of Traum Durch die Dämmerung, shimmers throughout his orchestra scores. Never have wind instruments sounded more richly, dulcetly, than in that Serenade für Dreizehn Bläser. At a first hearing of Also Sprach Zarathustra, it seemed as though the very dayspring had descended into the orchestra to make that famous brassy opening passage. For here, in the band of Strauss, the orchestra begins to round out its form and assume its logical shape. The various families of instruments are made independent; often play separately. The shattering brass of which Berlioz had dreamt is realized. Violas da more, haeckelphones, wind-machines are introduced into the band; the familiar instruments are used in unfamiliar registers. Through the tone-poems of Strauss, the orchestral composer for the first time has a suitable palette, and can achieve a brilliance quite as great as that which the modern painter can attain.

To-day, it is difficult to realize that Richard Strauss ever incensed such high hopes, that there was a time when he made appear realizable Nietzsche's mad dream of a modern music, and that for a while the nimbus of Dionysos burned round his figure. To-day, it is difficult to remember that once upon a time Strauss seemed to the world the golden youth of music, the enginerengineer [sic] of proud orchestral flights, the outrider and bannerman of his art. For it is long since he has promised to reveal the new beauty, the new rhythm, has seemed the wonderful start and flight toward some rarer plane of existence, some bluer aether, the friend of everything intrepid and living and young, the "arrow of longing for the Superman." It is a long while since any gracious lordly light has irradiated his person. In recent years, he has become almost the very reverse of what he was, of what he gave so brave an earnest of becoming. He who was once so electric, so vital, so brilliant a figure, has become dreary and outward and stupid, even. He who once seemed the champion of the new, has come to fill us with the weariness of the struggle, with deep self-distrust and discouragement, has become a heavy and oppressive weight. He who once sought to express the world about him, to be the poet of the coming time, now seems inspired only by a desire to