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Rh role in the man’s life, and keeps on playing a greater and greater. But it is probable that Strauss's desire for incessant gain is a sort of perversion, a mania that has gotten control over him because his energies are inwardly prevented from taking their logical course and creating works of art. Luxury-loving as he is, Strauss has probably never needed money sorely. Some money he probably inherited through his mother, the daughter of the Munich beer-brewer Pschorr; his works have always fetched large prices—his publishers have paid him as much as a thousand dollars for a single song; and he has always been able to earn great sums by conducting. No matter how lofty and severe his art might have become, he would always have been able to live as he chose. There is no doubt that he would have earned quite as much money with Salome and Der Rosenkavalier had they been works of high artistic merit, as he has earned with them in their present condition. The truth is that he has rationalized his unwillingness to go through the labour, the pains of creation, by pretending to himself a constant and great need of money, and permitting himself to dissipate his energies in a hectic disturbed shallow existence, in a tremor of concert-tours, guest-conductorships, money-making enterprises of all sorts, which leave him about two or three of the summer months for composition, and probably rob him of his best energies. So works leave his writing-table half-conceived, half-executed. The score of Elektra he permits his publishers to snatch from him before he is quite finished with it. He commences composing Der Rosenkavalier before having even seen the third act. The third act arrives; Strauss finds it miserable. But it is too late. The work is half-finished, and Strauss has to go through with it. Composition becomes more and more a mechanical thing, the brilliant orchestration of sloppy undistinguished music, the polishing up of details, the play of superficial cleverness which makes a score like Der Rosenkavalier, feeble as it is, interesting to many musicians.

And Richard Strauss, the one living musician who could with greatest ease settle down to uninterrupted composition, gets to his writing-table in his apartment in Charlottenburg every evening at nine o'clock, that is, whenever he is not on duty at the Berlin Opera.

And always the excuses: "Earning money for the support of wife and child is not shameful," or "I am going to accumulate a large enough fortune so that I can give up conducting entirely and spend