Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/180

148 to slay Klytemnaestra to the accompaniment of a sort of vals pervers. It is also in tempo di valse that Chrysothemis declares her need of wifehood and motherhood. As an organism, the work does not exist.

But even the expressiveness and considerability of Salome and Elektra, limited and unsatisfactory as it is, is wanting in the more recent works. With Der Rosenkavalier, Strauss seems to have reached a condition in which it is impossible for him to penetrate a subject deeply. No doubt, he always was spotty, even though in his golden days he invariably fixed the inner informing binding rhythm of each of his works. But his last works are not only spotty, but completely spineless as well, invertebrate masses upon which a few jewels, a few fine patches, gleam dully. Salome and Elektra had at least a certain dignity, a certain bearing. Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, Joseph's Legende, and Eine Alpensymphonie are makeshift, slack, slovenly despite all technical virtuosity, all orchestral marvels. Every one knows what the score of Rosenkavalier should have been, a gay, florid, licentious thing, the very image of the gallant century with its mundane amours and ribbons and cupids, its petit-maîtres and furbelows and billets-doux, its light emotions and equally light surrenders. But Strauss’s music is singularly flat and hollow and dun, joyless and soggy, even though it is dotted with waltzes and contains the delightful introduction to the third act and the brilliant trio. It has all the worst faults of the libretto. Hofmannsthal's "comedy for music," though gross and vulgar and cheap in spirit and unoriginal in design, is full of a sort of clever preciosity, full of piquant details culled from eighteenth century prints and memoirs. The scene of the coiffing is a print of Hogarth's translated to the stage; Rofrano's name, Octavian Maria Ehrenreich Bonaventura Fernand Hyazinth, is like an essay on the culture of the Vienna of Canaleto; the polite jargon of eighteenth century aristocratic Austria, spoken by the characters, with its stiff courteous forms and intermingled French, must have been studied from old journals and gazettes. And Strauss's score is equally precious, equally a thing of erudition and cleverness. Mozart turned the imbecilities of Schickaneder to his uses; Weber triumphed over the ridiculous romancings of Helmine von Chezy. But Strauss follows Hofmannsthal helplessly, soddenly. Just as Hofmannsthal imitates Hogarth, so Strauss imitates Mozart, affects his styles, his turns, his spirit;