CHAPTER VII

THE POST-CLASSICAL AND POETIC SCHOOLS OF MODERN GERMANY

The post-Beethovenian tendencies in the music of Germany and their present-day significance; the problem of modern symphonic form--The academic followers of Brahms: Bruch and others--The modern 'poetic' school: Richard Strauss as symphonic composer--Anton Bruckner, his life and works--Gustav Mahler--Max Reger, and others.

I

No other European nation can show, within the last fifty years, so great a variety of schools, and so great a variety of effort and achievement within each school, as the German. The reason is that the Germans were the only race that, by the middle of the nineteenth century, had beaten out a musical language that was capable of almost every kind of expression. Within the ample limits of that language there was room for the realization of any spirit and any form--post-classical or progressive, or a union of these two; poetic or abstract; vocal or instrumental; symphonic or operatic. And in each sphere the Germans developed both form and spirit to a point attained by no other nation--in the opera of Wagner, the post-Beethovenian symphony of Brahms and Bruckner, the symphonic poem of Strauss, the song of Hugo Wolf; while within the separate orbit of each of these leaders there moved a crowd of lesser but still goodly luminaries. It is remarkable, too, that each period that seemed a climax of development in this form or that proved to be only the starting-point for a new departure. Beethoven's spirit realized itself afresh in Wagner and Brahms, and in remoter but still easily traceable ways in Liszt and Strauss; in the best of Strauss, again, we can see coursing the sap of Wagner, but with a vitality that throws out unexpected, new and individual shoots; Schubert and Schumann, each seemingly so perfect, so complete in himself, blossom into a new and richer lyrical life in the songs of Hugo Wolf. To make clear the nature and the meaning of the modern German developments it will be necessary to survey rapidly the conditions that led up to them.

Beethoven, especially in his later symphonies, sonatas and quartets, had carried music to an intellectual and emotional height for a parallel to which we have to go back a century, to the colossal work of Bach. Beethoven bequeathed to music an enormous fund of expression and a perfected instrument of expression. Both of these were waiting for the new composers who could use them for the fertilization of modern music. Wagner seized upon the fund rather than the instrument. In place of the latter, though, indeed, with its assistance, he forged a new instrument of his own; but the impulse to the forging of it, and the strength for the forging of it, came to him in large measure from the deep draughts he had drunk of Beethoven's spirit. Schumann (the symphonic Schumann) and Brahms, on the other hand, were more content with the instrument as Beethoven had left it; or, to vary the illustration, they were satisfied, speaking broadly, to fill with more or less derivative pictures of their own the frame that Beethoven had bequeathed to them. But it was inevitable that a procedure of this kind should lead here and there to the petrification of form into formalism, both of idea and of design. For it is an error to suppose, as the writers of text-books too often do, that 'form' is something that can be conveyed by tuition or achieved by imitation. There is no such thing as form apart from the idea; the form _is_ simply the idea made visible and coherent. It is not the form that shapes the thought in the truly great masters; rather is the form simply the expression of the thought, as the form of a tree is the expression of the idea of a tree, or the form of the human body the expression of the idea of man. The post-classicists too often forgot that Beethoven's form and Beethoven's thought are inseparable--that they are, in truth, in the profoundest sense, merely different names for the same thing, the one totality viewed from different standpoints, as we may speak for convenience sake of the bodily man and the spiritual man, though, in truth, the living man is one and indivisible; and the post-classicists, indeed, from Brahms downwards, founded themselves upon the early or middle Beethoven, or even his eighteenth-century predecessors, rather than upon the Beethoven of the last works, with their incessant, titanic struggle to open new roads into art and life. With all his greatness, Brahms was not great enough to be to the symphony of his own day what Beethoven was to the symphony of his. Brahms raises an excellent crop from the delta fertilized by the waters of the great river as it debouched into the unknown sea; but that was all. He himself added nothing to the soil that could make it fertile enough to support yet another generation. All the technical mastery of Brahms--and it is very great indeed--cannot give to his symphonic music the thoroughly organic air of Beethoven's, the same sense of the perfect, unanalyzable fusion of form and matter.

[Illustration: Modern German Symphonists and Lyricists:]

Anton Bruckner Felix Draeseke Hugo Wolf Gustav Mahler

While Brahms was developing the classical heritage in his own way, Liszt and Wagner were boldly staking out claims on the future. With each of these composers the aim was the same--to find a form and an expression that, by their elasticity, would make music more equal to the painting of human life in all its manifold variety. This effort took two lines: the instrumental and the dramatic. Liszt, anticipated to some extent by Berlioz, tried to adapt the essence of the symphonic form to the new spirit. The problems he set himself have rarely been successfully solved, even to the present day; they block the path of every modern writer of symphonic poems, and of every writer of symphonies the impulse behind which is more or less definitely poetic.

The mere fact of the incessant fluctuation of modern composers between the two forms--the one-movement form of Liszt and the symphonic poem in general, and the four-movement form of the poetic or partly poetic symphony--shows that neither of them is of itself completely adequate. For against each of them strict logic can urge some pointed objection. The four-movement form, growing as it does out of the suite, is and will always be more appropriate to what may be roughly called 'pattern-music' rather than to poetic music; for the mere number of the movements, and the practically invariable order of their succession, implies the forcing of the thought into a preconceived frame, rather than the determining of the frame by the nature of the picture. The one-movement form is in itself more logical, but it is always faced by the problem of conciliating the natural evolution of a poetic idea and the decorative evolution of a musical pattern; and the symphonic poems in which this problem is satisfactorily solved might perhaps be counted on the fingers of one hand. There is a point in Strauss's _Till Eulenspiegel_, for example,

[Illustration: music score]

in which we feel acutely that the poetic--or shall we say the novelistic?--scheme that has so far been followed line by line is being put aside for the moment in order that the composer, having stated his thematic material, may subject it, for purely musical reasons, to something in the nature of the ordinary 'working-out.'

The four-movement form obviously allows greater scope to a composer who has a great deal to say upon a fruitful subject, but it labors under an equally obvious disability. The modern sense of psychological unity demands that the symphony of to-day shall justify, in its own being, the casting of it into this or that number of movements. Every work of art must, if challenged, be able to give an answer to what Wagner used to call the question 'Why?' 'Why,' we have a right to say to the composer, 'have you chosen to give your work just this form and these dimensions and no other?' It is because modern composers cannot quite silence the voice that whispers to them that the four-movement form is the form of the suite, in which the charm of the music comes mainly from the delight of the purely musical faculty with itself, rather than a form suited to a music that aims first of all at expressing more definite feelings about life, that they try to vivify the merely formal unity of the suite form with a psychological unity--mainly by means of quasi-leit-motifs that reappear in each of the movements.

But, though this system has given us some of our finest modern works of the symphonic type, it has its limitations. If the composer does not tell us the poetic meaning of his themes and all their reappearances, these reappearances frequently puzzle rather than enlighten us: this is notably the case with César Franck. If the composer works upon a single leit-motif, it is, as a rule, of the 'Fate-and-humanity' type of the Tschaikowsky symphony--a type that in the end becomes rather painfully conventional. This simplicity of plan, however, has the advantage of leaving the composer free to develop his musical material with the minimum of disturbance from the poetic idea. On the other hand, if his poetic scheme is at all copious or extensive, and he allows himself to follow all the vicissitudes of it, he must either give us a written clue to every page of his music--which he is generally unwilling and frequently unable to do--or pay the penalty of our failing to see in his music precisely what he intended to put there; for it is as true now as when Wagner wrote, three-quarters of a century ago, that purely instrumental music cannot permit itself such sudden and frequent changes as dramatic music without running the risk of becoming unintelligible. Always there arises within us, when the composer's thought branches off at an angle that does not seem to us justified by the inner logic of the music _quâ_ music, that awkward question, "Why?" and to that question only the stage action, as Wagner says, or a program, as most of us would say to-day, can supply a satisfactory answer. This conflict between form and matter can be seen running through almost all modern German instrumental music of the poetic order; only the genius of Strauss has been able to resolve the antinomy with some success. None of Beethoven's successors has been able, as he was, to fill every bar of a symphonic composition with equal meaning, or to convey, as he did in the third symphony, the fifth and the ninth, the sense of a drama that is implicit in the music itself, and so coherent, so perspicuous, that words cannot add anything to it in the way of definiteness.

II

The symphonic work of Brahms (by which one means not merely the symphonies but the overtures, the concertos, the chamber music and the piano music) does, indeed, as we have seen, found itself on the middle rather than the later Beethoven (whereas it was from the latest Beethoven that Wagner drew _his_ chief nourishment); but in spite of a certain timidity and a certain rigidity of form, Brahms's profound nature and his consummate workmanship give his work an individuality that enables him to stand by the side of Beethoven, though he never reaches quite to Beethoven's height. The other exploiters of the classical heritage have less individuality. They aim at breaking no new ground; they are content to till afresh the soil that the classical masters have fertilized for them.

Max Bruch may be taken as the type of a whole crowd of these post-classical writers. Their virtues are those that are always characteristic of the epigone. There is in art, as in the animal world, a protective mimicry that enables certain weaker species to assume at any rate the external markings of more vigorous organisms than themselves. In music, minds of this order clothe themselves with the qualities that lie on the surface of the great men's work. Their own art is parasitic (one uses that term, of course, without any offensive intention, with a biological, not a moral, implication). The parasitic organism lives easily in virtue of the fact that the parent organism undertakes all the labor of the chief vital functions. The epigone manipulates again and again the forms of his great predecessors. The substance he pours into these molds is hardly more his own. Yet work of this kind can have undeniable charm; after all, it is better for a man whose strength is not of the first order to live contentedly upon the side of the great mountain than to court destruction by trying to scale its dizziest peaks. The work of these epigones always has the balance and the clarity that come from the complete absence of any sense of a new problem to beat their heads against.

Max Bruch was born in 1838 and evinced the early precocity of genius; he had a symphony performed in his native Cologne at the age of fourteen. As a beneficiary of the Mozart Foundation he became a pupil of Ferdinand Hiller in composition and of Carl Reinecke and Ferdinand Breuning in piano. As executive musician he has had a brilliant career. After teaching in Cologne he became successively musical director in Coblentz, court kapellmeister in Sondershausen, chorus conductor in Berlin (_Sternscher Gesangverein_), conductor of the Philharmonic Society of Liverpool, England, and the _Orchesterverein_ of Breslau. In 1891 he became head of the 'master school' of composition in the Berlin Academy, was given the title of professor, received in 1893 the honorary degree of Doc. Mus. from Cambridge, and in 1898 became a corresponding member of the French Academy of Fine Arts.

His most important creative work is unquestionably represented by his large choral works with orchestra. Together with Georg Vierling (1820-1901) he may be credited with the modern revival of the secular cantata. _Frithjof_, op. 23 (1864), written during his stay in Mannheim (1862-64), was the foundation-stone of his reputation, followed soon after by the universally known 'Fair Ellen,' op. 25, and later by _Odysseus_, op. 41 (1873), _Arminius_, op. 43, 'The Song of the Bell,' op. 45, 'The Cross of Fire,' op. 52, all for mixed chorus. There is a sacred oratorio, 'Moses,' op. 52, and a secular one 'Gustavus Adolphus,' op. 73, and a large number of other choral works for mixed, male and female chorus. His operas, 'Lorelei' (1863) and 'Hermione' op. 40, had only a _succès d'estime_. The first violin concerto, in G minor, op. 26, is perhaps Bruch's most famous composition, and a grateful constituent of every violinist's repertoire. There are two other violin concertos (both in D minor), opera 44 and 45, a Romance, a Fantasia and other violin pieces with orchestra, also works for 'cello and orchestra, including the well-known setting of _Kol Nidrei_. Three symphonies (E-flat minor, F minor and E major), op. 28, 36 and 51; a few chamber music and piano pieces complete the catalogue of his works. Bruch's idiom is frankly melodic, though his harmonic texture is quite rich and his counterpoint varied. Formally he is conservative and, all in all, he imposes no strain upon the listener's power of comprehension. His music is solid and grateful, but not of striking originality. Through his masters, Reinecke and Hiller, he represents the Schumann-Mendelssohn tradition in a vigorous though inoffensive eclecticism.

The leading members of this order of composers in the Germany of the second half of the nineteenth century besides Bruch, were Hermann Goetz (1840-1876; symphony in F major), Friedrich Gernsheim (born 1839; four symphonies and much chamber music), Heinrich von Herzogenberg (1843-1900; chamber music, church music, symphonies, etc.), Joseph Rheinberger (1839-1901); Wilhelm Berger (1861-1911; works for choir and orchestra, chamber music, two symphonies, etc.); and Georg Schumann (1866; orchestral and choral works, chamber music, etc).

Goetz is best known for his work in the operatic field and may be more appropriately treated in that connection (see p. 245). Gernsheim, a native of Worms, was a student in the Leipzig conservatory and broadened his education by a sojourn in Paris (from 1855). The posts of musical director in Saarbrücken (1861), teacher of piano and composition at the Cologne conservatory (1865), conductor of the Maatschappig concerts in Rotterdam (1874) successively engaged his activities. From 1890-97 he taught at the Stern conservatory in Berlin and conducted the _Sternsche Gesangverein_ till 1904, besides the _Eruditio musica_ of Rotterdam. In 1901 he became principal of a master-school for composition. Since 1897 Gernsheim has been a member of the senate of the Royal Academy. Similar to Bruch in his tendencies, Gernsheim has composed, aside from the instrumental works mentioned above, a number of choral works of which _Salamis_, _Odin's Meeresritt_ (both for men's chorus, baritone and orchestra) and _Das Grab im Busento_ (men's chorus and orchestra) are especially notable. Overtures and a concerto each for piano, for violin, and for 'cello must be added to complete the list of his works.

Heinrich von Herzogenberg, too, is chiefly identified with the revival of choral song, especially of ecclesiastical character (a Requiem, op. 72; a mass, op. 87; _Totenfeier_, op. 80; 'The Birth of Christ,' op. 90; a Passion, op. 93, etc.). In this department Herzogenberg is the successor to Friedrich Kiel.

Rheinberger occupies a peculiar position. He is a stanch adherent to classical traditions and generally considered as an academic composer. That his classicism was not inconsistent with a hankering after the methods of the New German School, however, is shown in his Wallenstein symphony (op. 10) and his 'Christophorus' (oratorio). Having received his early training upon the organ, he has shown a preponderant tendency toward organ music and ecclesiastical composition in general. Nevertheless he has written, besides the works already named, a symphonic fantasy, three overtures, and considerable piano and chamber works. Eugen Schmitz[31] calls him a South German Raff, for 'as many-sided as Raff, he, in contrast to this master of North German training, received his musical education in South Germany.' (Born in Vaduz, in Lichtenstein, he continued his training in Feldkirch and during 1851-54 at the Royal School of Music in Munich). In Munich he became the centre of a veritable school of young composers, exerting a very broad influence, first as teacher of theory and later royal professor and inspector of the Royal School. Rheinberger also conducted the performances of the Royal Chapel choir. He received the honorary degree of Ph.D. from the University of Munich and became a member of the Berlin Academy.

Riemann's judgment of his merit, voiced in the following sentences, may be taken as just on the whole. He says: 'Rheinberger enjoyed a high reputation as composer, in the vocal as well as in the instrumental field. However, the contrapuntal mastery and the æsthetic instinct evident in his workmanship cannot permanently hide his lack of really warm-blooded emotion.' His organ works, of classic perfection, will probably last the longest. His _Requiem_, _Stabat Mater_, and a double-choir Mass stand at the head of his church compositions. He also wrote an opera, _Die Sieben Raben_. Like Bruch's, his style is eclectic, being a fusion of neo-classical and post-romantic influences.

Wilhelm Berger is a native of America (Boston, 1861), but was educated in Berlin, where he was a pupil of Fr. Kiel at the Royal _Hochschule_. Later he became teacher at the Klindworth-Scharwenka conservatory and in 1903 succeeded Fritz Steinbach as conductor of the famous Meiningen court orchestra. Some of his songs are widely known, but his choral compositions (_Totentanz_, _Euphorin_, etc.) constitute his most important work. Berger is a Brahms disciple without reserve, and so are Hans Kössler (b. 1853, symphonic variations for orchestra, etc.), Friedrich E. Koch (b. 1862, symphonic fugue in C minor, oratorio _Von den Tageszeiten_, etc.), Gustav Schreck (b. 1849), and Max Zenger (b. 1837). Georg Schumann, the last on our list of important epigones, has had more hearings abroad than most of his contemporary brothers-in-faith, especially with his oratorio 'Ruth' (1908), several times performed by the New York Oratorio Society. As conductor of the Berlin _Singakademie_ (since 1900), he has not lacked incentive to choral writing, hence 'Amor and Psyche,' _Preis und Danklied_, etc. A symphony in B, a serenade, op. 32, and other orchestral pieces as well as chamber works have come from his pen, all in the Brahms idiom.

The names of the still smaller men are legion. Let us mention but a few of them: Robert Radecke (1830-1911) wrote a symphony, overtures, and choral songs; Johann Herbeck (1831-77), symphonies, etc.; Joseph Abert (b. 1832), besides operas a symphony, a symphonic poem, 'Columbus,' and overtures; Albert Becker (1834-99), a Mass in B minor, a prize-crowned symphony, choral and chamber works; Franz Wüllner (1832-1902), chiefly choral works; Heinrich Hofmann (1842-1902), besides the operas _Armin_ and _Ännchen von Tharau_, a symphony, orchestral suites, cantatas, chamber music and piano music, much of it for four hands; and Franz Ries (b. 1846), suites for violin and piano, string quartets, etc. Georg Henschel is especially noted for his songs (see Vol. V); Hans Huber, a German Swiss, for his 'Böcklin Symphony' and chamber music; while the Germanized Poles Maurice Moszkowski (b. 1854) and the brothers Scharwenka (Philipp and Xaver, b. 1850) claim attention with pleasing and popular piano pieces. Needless to say, such a list as this can never be complete.

III

Side by side with the neo-classical school, but always steadily encroaching upon it, is the 'poetic' school that derives from Liszt and Wagner. It is a truism of criticism that in musical history the big men end periods rather than begin them. The composer who inaugurates a movement appears to posterity as a fumbler rather than a master, and even in his own day his methods and his ideals fail to command general respect, so wide a gulf is there in them between intention and achievement. It was so, for example, with Liszt and his immediate school. But in the end there comes a man who, with a greater natural genius than his predecessors, assimilates all they have to teach him either imaginatively or formally, and brings to fulfillment what in them was at its best never more than promise. The tentative work of Liszt comes to full fruition in the work of Strauss. He has a richer musical endowment than any of his predecessors in his own special line, and a technical skill to which none of them could ever pretend. Liszt had imagination, but he never succeeded in making a thoroughly serviceable technique for himself, no doubt because his early career as a pianist made it impossible for him to work seriously at composition until comparatively late in life. Strauss is of the type of musician who readily learns all that the pedagogues can teach him, and utilizes the knowledge thus acquired as the basis for a new technique of his own.

Richard Strauss was born June 11, 1864, in Munich, the son of Franz Strauss, a noted Waldhorn player (royal chamber musician). He studied composition with the local court kapellmeister, W. Meyer, and as early as 1881 gave striking evidence of his talent in a string quartet in A minor (op. 2), which was played by the Walter quartet. A Symphony in D minor, an overture in C minor and a suite for thirteen wind instruments, op. 7, all performed in public, the last by the famous 'Meininger' orchestra, quickly spread his name among musicians and in 1885 he was engaged by Hans von Bülow as musical director to the ducal court at Meiningen. Here Alexander Ritter is said to have influenced him in the direction of ultra-modernity. After another year Strauss returned to Munich as third royal kapellmeister; three years later (1889) he became Lassen's associate as court conductor in Weimar; from 1894 to 1898 he was again in Munich, this time as court conductor, and at the end of that period went to Berlin to occupy a similar post at the Royal Prussian court. In 1904 he became general musical director (_Generalmusikdirektor_). Since the appearance of his first works mentioned above he has been almost incessantly occupied with composition.

These early works and those immediately following give little hint of the later Strauss, except for the characteristically hard-hitting strength of it almost from the first. Works like the B minor piano sonata (op. 5) and the 'cello sonata (op. 6), for example, have a curious, cubbish demonstrativeness about them; but it is plain enough already that the cub is of the great breed. With the exception of a few songs, and a setting of Goethe's _Wanderers Sturmlied_ for chorus and orchestra (op. 14), all his music until his twenty-second year was in the traditional instrumental forms; it includes, besides the works already mentioned, a string quartet (op. 2), a violin concerto (op. 8), a symphony (op. 12), a quartet for piano and strings (op. 13), a _Burleske_ for piano and orchestra, and sundry smaller works for piano solo, etc. According to his own account, he was first set upon the path of poetic music by Alexander Ritter--a man of no great account as a composer, but restlessly alive to the newest musical currents of his time, and with the literary gift of rousing enthusiasm in others for his own ideas. He was an ardent partisan of the 'New German' school of Liszt and Wagner. Of his own essays in the operatic field only two saw completion: _Der faule Hans_ (1885) and _Wem die Krone?_ (1890). They were mildly successful in Munich and Weimar. Besides these he wrote symphonic poems that at least partially bridge the gap between Liszt and Strauss; 'Seraphic Phantasy,' 'Erotic Legend,' 'Olaf's Wedding Procession,' and 'Emperor Rudolph's Ride to the Grave' are some of the titles. Ritter was of Russian birth (Narva), but lived in Germany from childhood (Dresden, Leipzig, Weimar, Würzberg, etc). He was a close friend of Bülow and married Wagner's niece, Franziska Wagner.

[Illustration: Richard Strauss] _After a crayon by Faragò (1905)_

The first-fruits of Ritter's influence upon Strauss were the symphonic fantasia _Aus Italien_ (1886). The young revolutionary as yet moves with a certain amount of circumspection. The new work is poetic, programmatic, but it is cast in the conventional four-movement form, the separate movements corresponding roughly to those of the ordinary symphony. It is obviously a 'prentice work,’ but it is of significance in Strauss's history for a warmth of emotion that had been only rarely perceptible in his earlier music. Here and there it has the rude, knockabout sort of energy that was noticeable in some of the earlier works, and that in the later works was to degenerate into a mere noisy slamming about of commonplaces; but it also shows much poetic feeling, and in particular an ardent romantic appreciation of nature.

_Aus Italien_ was followed by a series of remarkable tone-poems--_Don Juan_ (op. 20, 1888), _Macbeth_ (op. 23, written 1886-7 but not published until after the _Don Juan_), _Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche_ (op. 28, 1894-95), _Also sprach Zarathustra_ (op. 30, 1894-95), _Don Quixote_ (op. 39, 1897), _Ein Heldenleben_ (op. 40, 1898), and the _Symphonia Domestica_ (op. 53, 1903). With the last-named work Strauss bade farewell to the concert room for many years, the next stage of his development being worked out in the opera house.

The forms, no less than the titles, of the orchestral works, reveal the many-sidedness of Strauss's mind, the keenness of his interest in life and literary art, the individuality of the point of view from which he regards each of his subjects, and the peculiarly logical medium he adopts for the expression of each of them. Bound up with this adaptability are a certain restlessness that drives him on to abandon every field in turn before he has developed all the possibilities of it, and a certain anxiety to 'hit the public between the eyes' each time that gives him now and then the appearance of exploiting new sensations for new sensations' sake. It is perhaps not doing him any injustice, for instance, to suppose that a very keen finger upon the public pulse warned him that it would be unwise to bombard it with another blood-and-lust drama of the type of _Salome_ and _Elektra_; so, with an admirably sure instinct, he relaxes into the broad comedy of _Der Rosenkavalier_. Feeling after this that the public wanted something newer still, he tried, in _Ariadne auf Naxos_, to combine drama and opera in the one work. Then, realizing from the Western European successes of the Russians that ballet is likely to become the order of the day, he tries his hand at a modified form of this in 'The Legend of Joseph.'

What in the later works has become, however, almost as much a commercial as an artistic impulse, was in the early years the genuine quick-change of a very fertile, eager spirit, with extraordinary powers of poetic and graphic expression in music. Strauss, like Wagner, is a musical architect by instinct; he can plan big edifices and realize them. The sureness of this instinct is incidentally shown by the varied forms of these early and middle-period orchestral works of his. As we have seen, the writer of symphonic poems is always confronted by the serious problem of harmonizing a poetic with a musical development; and in practice we find that, as a rule, either the following of the literary idea destroys the purely musical logic of the work, or, in his anxiety to preserve a formal logic in his music, the composer has to impair the simplicity or the continuity of the poetic scheme, as Strauss has had to do in the passage in _Till Eulenspiegel_, already cited. But, on the whole, Strauss has come much nearer than any other composer to solving the problem of combined poetic and musical form in instrumental music. In _Macbeth_ he has 'internalized' the dramatic action in a very remarkable way--a procedure he might have adopted with advantage on other occasions. Here, where there was every temptation to the superficially effective painting of externalities, he has dissolved the pictorial and episodical into the psychological, making Macbeth's own soul the centre of all the dramatic storm and stress, and so allowing full scope for the purely expressive power of music. In _Don Juan_ the form is rightly quasi-symphonic--a group of workable main themes representing the hero, with a group of subsidiary themes suggestive of the minor characters that cross his path and the circumstances under which he meets with them. The tissue is not woven throughout with absolute continuity, but the form as a whole is lucid and coherent. The episodical adventures of _Till Eulenspiegel_ could find no better musical frame than the rondo form that Strauss has chosen for them; while the variation form is most suited to the figures, the adventures, and the psychology of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. In the _Symphonia Domestica_ the number and relationship of the characters, and the incidents that make up the domestic day, are best treated in a form that is virtually that of the ordinary symphony compressed into a single movement. A similar congruity between form and matter will be found in _Also sprach Zarathustra_ and _Ein Heldenleben_.

This fertility of form was only the outward and visible sign of an extraordinary fertility of conception. No other composer, before or since, has poured such a wealth of thinking into program music, created so many poetic-musical types, or depicted their _milieu_ with such graphic power. Each new work, dealing as it did with new characters and new scenes, spontaneously found for itself a new idiom, melodic, harmonic and rhythmic; in this unconscious transformation of his speech in accordance with the inward vision Strauss resembles Wagner and Hugo Wolf. The immense energy of the mind is shown not only in the range and variety of its psychology, but physically, as it were, in the wide trajectory of the melodies, the powerful gestures of the rhythms that sometimes, indeed, become almost convulsive--and the long-breathed phraseology of passages like the opening section of _Ein Heldenleben_.

It was perhaps inevitable that this extraordinary energy should occasionally get out of hand and degenerate into a sort of _Unbändigkeit_. Strauss is at once a man of genius and an irresponsible street urchin. With all his gifts, something that goes to the making of the artist of the very greatest kind is lacking in him. He has a giant span of conception that is rare in music; but he seems to take a pleasure in constructing gigantic edifices only to spoil them for the admiring spectator by scrawling a fatuity or an obscenity across the front of them. He can be, at times, unaccountably perverse, malicious, childish towards his own creations. This element in him, or rather the seeds from which it has developed, first become clearly visible in _Till Eulenspiegel_. There, however, it remains pure _gaminerie_; it does not clash with the nature of the subject, and the jovial, youthful spirits and the happy inventiveness of the composer carry it off. But afterwards it often assumes an unpleasant form. There are one or two things in _Don Quixote_ that amuse us a little at first but afterwards become rather tiresome, as over-insistence on the purely physical grotesque always does in time. In _Ein Heldenleben_ a drama that is mostly worked out on a high spiritual plane is vulgarized by the crude physical horror of the brutal battle scene, and by the now well-nigh pointless humor of the ugly 'Adversaries' section. There are pettinesses and sillinesses in the _Symphonia Domestica_ that one can hardly understand a man of Strauss's eminence troubling to put on paper. Altogether, we may say of the Strauss of the instrumental works alone--we can certainly say it of the later Strauss of the operas--that he is, in Romain Rolland's phrase, a curious compound of 'mud, débris, and genius.' Always he is a spirit at war with itself; sometimes he seems cursed, like an obverse of Goethe's Mephistopheles, to will the good and work the ill. But he has enriched program music with a large fund of new ideas, and given it a new direction and a new technique. He has established, more thoroughly than any other composer, the right of poetic instrumental music to a place by the side of abstract music. He has attempted things that were thought impossible in music, sometimes failing, but more often than not succeeding extraordinarily.

His workmanship is equal to his invention; of him at any rate the post-classicists can never say, as they said half a century ago of Liszt and his school, that he writes literary music because he lacks the self-discipline and the skill necessary for success in the abstract forms. If anything his technique, especially his orchestral technique, is too astounding; it tempts him to do amazing but unnecessary things for the mere sake of doing them. But with all his faults he is a colossus of sorts; he bestrides modern German music as Wagner did that of half a century ago. In wealth and variety of emotion and in power of graphic utterance his work as a whole is beyond comparison with that of any other contemporary composer.

IV

The life of Strauss overlaps that of his great post-classical antithesis Brahms by thirty-three years, and by thirty-six years that of Anton Bruckner (1824-1896), a symphonist who is still little known, and that for two reasons. In the first place, his works are as a rule excessively long; in the second place, he had the misfortune to live in Vienna, where the Brahms partisans were at one time all-powerful. Some of them resented the pretensions of another symphonist to comparison with their own idol, and by innuendo and neglect, rather than by direct attack, they contrived to diffuse a legend that has maintained itself almost down to our own day, that Bruckner was merely an amiable old gentleman with a passion for writing symphonies, but one who need not be taken too seriously. As a matter of fact, he was a good deal more than that. There is no necessity to flaunt a defiant Brucknerian banner in the face of the Brahmsians, but there is every necessity to say that great as Brahms was he by no means exhausted the possibilities of the modern symphony, and that several of the possibilities that he left untouched were turned to excellent use by Bruckner.

Bruckner's life was remarkably circumscribed and offers practically no interest to a biographer. The son of a country schoolmaster in Ansfelden, Upper Austria (where he was born Sept. 4, 1824), he spent his early life following in his father's footsteps, first at Windhag (near Freistadt), later at St. Florian, where he also filled a temporary post as organist. By his own efforts he became highly proficient on that instrument and in counterpoint. This fact and his constant connection with the church influenced his creative work strongly. In 1855 he became cathedral organist at Linz, meantime studying counterpoint with Sechter in Vienna, where he later (1867) became his master's successor as court organist. He also studied composition with Otto Kitzler in 1861-63. Aside from his activities as professor of organ, counterpoint and composition at the Vienna Conservatory and as lecturer on music at the Vienna University, this constitutes the outward record of his career. He died in Vienna, Oct. 11, 1896.

Similarly devoid of variety in their classification are his compositions--besides his nine symphonies, upon which his reputation rests, there are only three masses (D minor, 1864; E minor, 1869; F minor, 1872) and a few more sacred works (including the '150th Psalm'); four compositions for men's chorus accompanied (_Germanenzug_ and _Helgoland_, with orchestra; _Das hohe Lied_ and _Mitternacht_, with piano); some others _a cappella_, and one string quartet. Mostly works of large calibre and commensurately broad in conception.

The error is still frequently made--it was an error that did him much harm in anti-Wagnerian Vienna during his lifetime--of regarding Bruckner as one who tried to translate Wagner into terms of the symphony. For Wagner, indeed, he had a passionate admiration; but his own affinities as a composer with Wagner are so trifling as to be negligible. The real heirs of Wagner are the men who, like Strauss, aim at making purely instrumental music a vehicle for the expression of definite poetic ideas--whose symphonic poems are really operas without words, with the orchestra as the actors. Bruckner, even with Liszt's example before him, passed the symphonic poem by on the other side. His nine symphonies are almost as purely 'abstract' music as those of Brahms; if one qualifies the comparison with an 'almost' it is not because Bruckner worked upon anything even remotely resembling a program, but because the rather sudden transitions here and there in the symphonies, lacking as they do a strictly logical musical connection, are apt to suggest that the composer had in his mind some more or less definite extra-musical symbol. But this explanation of the undeniable fact that there is more than one hiatus in the Bruckner movements, though it is not an impossible one, is not the most probable one in every case.

A certain disconnectedness was almost inevitable in such a symphonic method as that of Bruckner. He had no appetite for the merely formal 'working-out' that Brahms could manipulate with such facility, but frequently without convincing us that he is saying anything very germane to his main topic. For a frank recognition of Brahms' general mastery of form is not incompatible with an equally frank recognition that too often formalism was master of him. The danger of a transmitted classical technique in any art is that now and then it tempts its practitioners to talk--and allows them to talk quite fluently--when they have really nothing of vital importance to say. Take, as an example, bars 58-73 of the first movement of Brahms' fourth symphony. This passage is not merely dull; it is absolutely meaningless. It carries the immediately preceding thought no further; it is no manner of necessary preparation for the thought that comes immediately after. It is 'padding' pure and simple; a mechanical manipulation of the clay without any clear idea on the part of the potter as to what he wishes to model. Brahms, in fact, knows, or half-knows, that he has travelled as far as he can go along one road, and has a little time to wait before etiquette permits him to proceed up another: so he marks time with the best grace he can--or, to vary the illustration, having said all he can think of in connection with A, and not being due just yet to discuss B, he simply goes on talking until he can think of something to say. Such a passage as this would have been impossible for Beethoven: his rigorously logical mind would have rejected it as being a mere inorganic patch upon the flesh of a living organism: he would never have rested until he had re-established the momentarily interrupted flow of vital blood between the severed parts.

For a mechanical technique such as Brahms uses here, Bruckner had no liking, nor would it have been of much use in connection with ideas like his. In his general attitude towards the symphony he reminds us somewhat of Schubert. He does not start, as Brahms does, with a subject that, however admirable it may be in itself, and however excellently it may be adapted for the germination of fresh matter from it, has obviously been chosen in some degree because of its 'workableness.' With Bruckner, as with Schubert, the subject sings out at once simply because it must. The composer is too full of the immediate warmth of the idea to premeditate 'development' of it. So it inevitably comes about that, with both Bruckner and Schubert, repetition takes, in some degree, the place of development. Symphonic development, speaking broadly, becomes technically easier in proportion as the thematic matter to be manipulated is shorter; looking at the music for the moment as a mere piece of tissue-weaving, it is evident that more permutations and combinations can easily be made out of a theme like that of the first subject of Beethoven's fifth symphony than out of the main theme of Liszt's _Tasso_, or the Francesca theme in Tschaikowsky's _Francesca da Rimini_. Wagner, with his keen symphonic sense, gradually realized this; whereas the leit-motifs of his early works are, as a rule, fairly lengthy melodies, those of his later works are of a pregnant brevity. The reason for this change of style was that, as he came to see more and more clearly the possibilities of a symphonic development of the orchestral voice in opera, he saw also that the interweaving of themes would be at once closer and more elastic if the motifs themselves were made shorter.

This generic musical fact is the explanation of much of the formal unsatisfactoriness of the average symphonic poem. If the object of the poetic musician is to depict a character, he will need a fairly wide sweep of melodic outline. We could not, for example, suggest Hamlet or Faust in a theme so short and simple as that of the first subject of the _Eroica_, or the first subject of the Second Symphony of Brahms--to say nothing of the 'Fate' theme of Beethoven's Fifth. But the wide-stretching poetic theme pays for its psychological suggestiveness by sacrificing, in most cases, its 'workableness.' And composers have only latterly learned how to overcome this disability by constructing the big, character-drawing theme on a sort of fishing-rod principle, with detachable parts. It takes Strauss nearly one hundred and twenty bars in which to draw the full portrait of his hero in the splendid opening section of _Ein Heldenleben_; but various pieces of the chief theme can be used at will later so as to suggest some transformation of mood in the hero, or some change in his circumstances. The curious falling figure in the third bar of the work, for example, that at first conveys an idea of headlong energy, afterwards becomes a roar of pain and rage (full score, pp. 118 ff, and elsewhere). Had Liszt had the imagination to hit upon such a device as this, and the technique to manipulate it, he might have given to the 'development' of his symphonic poems something of the organic life that Strauss has infused into his.

Bruckner also lacked, in the main, this knowledge of how to work upon sweeping ideas that were conceived primarily for purely expressive rather than 'developmental' purposes, and at the same time to make either the whole theme or various fragments of it plastic factors in the evolution of an organically-knit texture. If Brahms would have been none the worse for a little of that quality in Bruckner that made it impossible for him to talk unless he had something to say, Bruckner would have been all the better for a little of Brahms' gift of making the most of whatever fragment of material he was using at the moment. When Bruckner attempts 'development' in the scholastic sense, as in bars 300 ff of the first movement of the third symphony, he is almost always awkward and unconvincing. His logic--and a logic of his own he certainly had--was less formal than poetic; as one gets to know the symphonies better one is surprised to find emotional continuity coming into many a passage that had previously appeared a trifle incoherent. His musical logic is just the logic of any true and spontaneous thing said simply, naturally and feelingly.

While it is true in one sense that Bruckner's methods and outlook remained the same in each of his nine published symphonies (the ninth, by the way, was left uncompleted at his death), in another sense it puts a false complexion on the truth. We do not find in him any such growth--discernible in the texture not less than in the manner--as we do from the First Symphony to the Ninth of Beethoven, or from the _Rienzi_ to the _Parsifal_ of Wagner. In externals, and to some extent in essentials also, Bruckner's method and manner are the same throughout his life--the wide-spun imaginative first movement, the thoughtful _adagio_, the wild or merry _scherzo_, the rather sprawling _finale_. But there was a real evolution of the intensive kind; and in the last three symphonies in particular everything has become enormously _vertieft_. In the ninth, Bruckner often attains to a Beethovenian profundity and pregnancy. His greatest fault is his inability to concentrate: his material is almost invariably excellent, but he is too prodigal with it. He is not content with two or three main ideas, that in themselves would constitute material enough for a movement; to these he needs to add episodes of all kinds, until the movement expands to a size that makes listening to it a physical strain, and renders it difficult for the mind to grasp the true proportions of it. This is generally the case with his first and last movements; not even the titanic power of conception in movements like the finale of his fifth and eighth symphonies, nor the extraordinary technical mastery they show, can quite reconcile us to their length and apparent diffuseness. His most expressive work is frequently to be found in his adagios, though there, too, his method is at times so leisurely that in spite of the fine quality of the material and the depth of feeling in the music, it is sometimes hard to maintain one's interest in it to the end. In his _scherzi_ he is more conciliatory to the average listener. Here he is incontestably nearer to Beethoven than Brahms ever came in movements of this type. In place of the charming but rather irrelevant quasi-pastorals with which Brahms is content for the scherzi of his symphonies, Bruckner writes movements overflowing with vitality, a veritable riot of rhythmic energy. He will never be popular in the concert room; his excessive length and his frequent diffuseness are against that. But to musicians he will always be one of the most interesting figures in nineteenth-century music--a composer fertile in ideas of a noble kind, an imaginative artist with the power of evoking moods of a refined and moving poetry. And certainly there is no contrast more remarkable in the whole history of music than that between the quiet, embarrassed, unlettered recluse that was the man Bruckner, and the volcano of passion that was the musician. Undoubtedly he has the great hand, and at times he can shake the world with it as Beethoven did with his. His place is between Beethoven and Schubert: with each of his hands he holds a hand of theirs.

V

The third big figure among the representatives of the modern 'poetic' school is Gustav Mahler. Like the other two, he is of the 'southern wing'; like Bruckner's, his training was Viennese. Born in Kalischt (Bohemia), he went to the capital as a student in the university and the conservatory. Already at twenty he began that brilliant career as conductor which during his lifetime somewhat overshadowed his recognition as a creative artist. His first post was at Hall (Upper Austria), where he conducted a theatre orchestra; thence he went to Laibach, Olmütz, Kassel (as _Vereinsdirigent_); thence to Prague as conductor of the German National Theatre (1885). In 1886 he substituted for Nikisch at the Leipzig opera; two years later he became opera conductor in Budapest, 1891 in Hamburg, and 1897 returned to Vienna, first as conductor, soon after to become director of the Royal Opera, where he remained till 1907. During 1898-1900 he conducted the Philharmonic concerts as well. In 1909 he came to New York as conductor of the Philharmonic Society and remained till 1911, when failing health, perhaps aggravated by uncongenial conditions, forced him to resign. He died shortly after his return to Vienna, in the same year.

[Illustration: Max Reger] _After a photograph from life_

While still in his youth Mahler wrote an opera, 'The Argonauts,' besides songs and chamber music. A musical 'fairy play,' _Rübezahl_, with text by himself, the _Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen_, and nine symphonies, designed on a gigantic scale, constitute the bulk of his mature works. Other songs, a choral work with orchestra (_Das klagende Lied_), and the 'Humoresques' for orchestra nearly complete the list.

Bruckner left the problem of modern symphonic form unsolved. Brahms

## partly solved it in one way, by following the classical tradition on

its more 'abstract' side; Strauss has partially solved it in another way, by making the 'moments' of the musical evolution of a work tally with those of a program. Mahler, on the other hand, aimed at a course which was a sort of compromise between all the others. His nine symphonies are neither abstract music nor program music in the ordinary sense of the latter word; yet they are 'programmatic' in the broad sense that in whole and in detail they are motived more or less by definite concepts of man and his life in the world. Mahler faced more clear-sightedly and consistently than any other composer of his day the problem of the combination of the vocal and the symphonic form. That this combination is full of as yet unrealized possibilities will be doubted by no one familiar with the history of music since Beethoven. In one shape or another the problem has confronted probably nine-tenths of our modern composers. Wagner found one partial solution of it in his symphonic dramas, in which the orchestra pours out an incessant flood of eloquent music, the vague emotions of which are made definite for us by the words and the stage action. The ordinary symphonic poem attempts much the same thing by means of a printed program that is intended to help the hearer to read into the generalized expression of the music a certain particular application of each emotion; we may put it either that the symphonic poem is the Wagnerian music drama without the stage and the characters, or that the Wagnerian music drama is the symphonic poem translated into visible action. But for the best part of a century the imagination of composers has been haunted by the experiment made by Beethoven in his Ninth Symphony, of combining actual voices with the ordinary symphonic form; it has always been felt that instrumental music at its highest tension and utmost expression almost of necessity calls out for completion in the human cry. Words are often necessary in order at once to intensify and to elucidate the vague emotions to which alone the instruments can give expression. It was the consciousness of this that impelled Liszt to introduce the chorus at the end of his 'Dante' and 'Faust' symphonies.

To a mind like Mahler's, full of striving, of aspiration, of conscious reflection upon the world, it was even more necessary that some means should be found of giving definite direction to the indefinite sequences of emotion of instrumental music. Almost from the beginning he adopted the device of introducing a vocal element into his symphonies. In the Second, a solo contralto sings, in the fourth movement, some lines from the _Des Knaben Wunderhorn_--'O rosebud red! Mankind lies in sorest need, in sorest pain! In heaven would I rather be!... I am from God, and back to God again will go; God in His mercy will grant me a light, will lighten me to eternal, blessed life'--while the idea of resurrection that is the theme of the music of the fifth movement is _precisé_ by a chorus singing Klopstock's ode, 'After brief repose thou shalt arise from the dead, my dust; immortal life shall be thine.' In the fourth movement of the third symphony--the 'Nature' symphony--a contralto solo sings the moving lines, '_O Mensch, gieb Acht!_' from Nietzsche's _Also sprach Zarathustra_; and in the sixth movement the contralto and a female choir dialogue with each other in some verses from _Des Knaben Wunderhorn_. Five stanzas from the same poem are set as a soprano solo in the finale of the Fourth Symphony. And in the First Symphony, though the voices are not actually used, the composer, in the first and third movements, draws upon the themes of certain of his own songs (_Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen_). In the Eighth Symphony the intermixture of orchestra and voices is so close that the title of 'symphonic cantata' would fit the work perhaps as well as that of 'symphony with voices'; here the kernel of the music is formed by the old Latin hymn _Veni, creator spiritus_ and some words from the final scene of the second part of Goethe's _Faust_.

Mahler's use of the voice in the orchestra is, as will be seen, something quite different from merely singing the 'program' of the work instead of printing it. His aim is the suggestion of symbols rather than the painting of realities. Even where, on the face of the case, it looks at first as if his object had been a realistic one, his intention was often less realistic than mystical. In the Seventh Symphony, for instance, he introduces cowbells; we have it from his own mouth that here his aim was not simply a piece of pastoral painting, but the suggestion of 'the last distant greeting from earth that reaches the wanderer on the loftiest heights.' 'When I conceive a big musical painting,' he said once, 'I always come to a point at which I must bring in speech as the bearer of my musical idea. So must it have been with Beethoven when writing his Ninth Symphony, only that his epoch could not provide him with the suitable materials--for at bottom Schiller's poem is not capable of giving expression to the "unheard" that was within the composer.' In this Mahler is no doubt right; the modern composer has a wider range of poetry to draw upon for the equivalent of his musical thought.

Mahler's form is in itself a beautiful and a rational one; and, as with all other forms, the question is not so much the 'How' as the 'What' of the music. Mahler, perhaps, never fully realized the best there was in him; fine as his music often is, it as often suggests a mind that had not yet arrived at a true inner harmony. His mind was always an arena in which dim, vast dreams of music of his own struggled with impressions from other men's music that incessantly thronged his brain as they must that of every busy conductor, and with more or less vague, poetic, philosophical and humanitarian visions. He never quite succeeded in making for himself an idiom unmistakably and exclusively his own; all sorts of composers, from Beethoven and Bruckner to Johann Strauss, seem to nod to each other across his pages. As the Germans would say, his _Können_ was not always equal to his _Wollen_. His feverish energy, his excitable imagination, and his lack of concentration continually drove him to the writing of works of excessive length, demanding unusually large forces; the Eighth Symphony, for example, with its large orchestra, seven soloists, boys' choir and two mixed choirs, calls for a _personnel_ of something like one thousand. Yet he could be amazingly simple and direct at times, as is shown by his lovely songs and by many a passage in the symphonies that have a folk-song flavor. His individuality as a symphonist is incontestable, and it is probable that as time goes on his reputation will increase. Alone among modern German composers he is comparable to Strauss for general vitality, ardor of conception, ambition of purpose, and pregnancy of theme.

VI

In abstract music the biggest figure in the Germany of to-day is Max Reger (born 1873)[32]--almost the only composer of our time who has remained unaffected by the changes everywhere going on in European music, though in his _Romantische Suite_ he coquets a little with French impressionism. His output is enormous, and almost suggests spawning rather than composition in the ordinary sense of the word. His general idiom is founded mainly on Bach, with a slight indebtedness to Brahms; for anything in the nature of program music he appears to have no sympathy. The bulk of his work consists of organ music, songs, and piano and chamber music. His facility is incredible. He speaks a harmonic and contrapuntal language of exceptional richness; but it must be said that very often his facility and the copiousness of his vocabulary tempt him to over-write his subject; sometimes the contrapuntal web is woven so thickly that no music can get through. But every now and then this rather heavy-limbed genius achieves a curious limpidity and grace, and a moving tenderness. If it be undeniable that had Bach never lived a large part of Reger's music would not have been written, it is equally undeniable that some of his organ works are worthy to be signed by Bach himself.

It may be a significant fact, as well as helpful in assaying the value of modern theoretical pedagogy, that Reger, super-technician that he is, was taught composition, as Riemann's _Lexikon_ boasts, 'entirely after the text-books and editions of H. Riemann.' 'And,' it goes on to say, 'in addition, he studied for five years under Riemann's personal direction.' Riemann, it must be borne in mind, is not a composer, but a theoretician of extraordinary capacity. How little to the liking of his master Reger's subsequent development has been may be seen from the following quotation from the same article: 'Reger evinced already in his (unpublished) first compositions a tendency to extreme complication of facture and to an overloading of the technical apparatus, so that his development ought to have been the opposite to that of Wagner, for instance, i.e. a restriction of the imagination aiming at progressive simplification. Instead of this he has allowed himself to be influenced by those currents in an opposite direction, regarding which contemporary criticism has lost all judgment. With full consciousness he heaps up daring harmonies and arbitrary feats of modulation in a manner which is positively intolerant to the listener[!]. Reger's very strong melodic gifts could not under such conditions arrive at a healthy development. Only when a definite form forces him into

## particular tracks (variations, fugue, chorale transcription) are his

works unobjectionable; the wealth of his inventive power and his eminently polyphonic nature enable him to be sufficiently original and surprising even within such bounds. On the other hand, in simple pieces of small dimensions, and in songs, his intentional avoidance of natural simplicity is actually repugnant. His continuous prodigality of the strongest means of expression soon surfeit one, and in the end this excessive richness becomes a mere stereotyped mannerism.'

No doubt the learned doctor is somewhat pedantic, but curiously enough the opinion of less conservative critics is not dissimilar. Dr. Walter Niemann refers to Reger's condensed, harmonically overladen style as a 'modern _barock_,' a 'degeneration of Brahmsian classicism.' 'Universally admired is Reger's astounding contrapuntal routine,' he says, 'the routine that is most evident in the (now schematic, stereotyped) construction of his fugues and double fugues; one also generally admires his enormous constructive ability (_satztechnisches Können_), the finished art of subtle detail which he exhibits most charmingly in his smallest forms, the Sonatinas, the _Schlichte Weisen_. But, leaving out all the hypocrisy of fashion, the all-too-willing, unintelligent deification of the great name, all musical cliquism and modernistic partisanship, the hearing of Reger's music either leaves us inwardly unconcerned and even bores us, or it strikes us as more or less repulsive. Details may well please us, and we are often honestly prepared to praise a delicate mood, the atmospheric coloring, the masterful construction. But, impartially, no one will ever remark that Reger's art exerts heartfelt, profound or ethical influences upon the listener.'[33]

The particular partisanship to which Niemann refers is one of the outstanding features of contemporary German musical life. Reger has enjoyed a truly extraordinary vogue in his own country. For that reason we are devoting somewhat more space to him than we otherwise should, for we do not acknowledge his right to contend with Strauss for the mastery of his craft. We certainly do not share the opinion of his partisans, who have pronounced him a reincarnated Bach, the completer of Beethoven, the heir to Brahms' mantle and what not. Great as is his ability, we share Niemann's view that 'his great power lies not in invention but in transformation and after-creation' (_Um und Nachschaffen_). Give him a good melody and he will embroider it, metamorphose it, combine it with innumerable other elements in an erudite--we had almost said inspired--manner; give him a cast-iron form as a frame and he will fill it with the most richly colored, tumultuously crowded canvas, but the style of his broideries will be curiously similar and all too fiercely pondered, the colors of his canvas will suggest the studio instead of the open air, the figures will be abnormal, fantastic or pathetic to the point of morbidity--they will not be images of nature.

Brahms is the prevailing influence in Reger, though in manner rather than in spirit, the Bach polyphony and structure, the Liszt-Wagnerian harmonic color, and the acute German romanticism notwithstanding. As regards his symphonic and chamber works this is generally conceded and needs no further comment.

Like Brahms, by the way, Reger approached the orchestra reluctantly; sonatas for various instruments, chamber works in various combinations preceded his first orchestral essay. The _Sinfonietta_ (op. 90), the Serenade in G major (op. 95), the Hiller Variations (op. 100), the Symphonic Prologue to a Tragedy (op. 108), were presumably harbingers of a real symphony. Instead, however, there followed a _Konzert im alten Stil_ (op. 123), a 'Romantic Suite' (op. 125) and a 'Ballet Suite' (op. 130), again showing Reger's prediliction for the antique forms; and a series of 'Tone Poems after Pictures by Böcklin' (op. 128),[34] which would indicate a turn toward the impressionistic mood-painting of the ultra-modern wing of the 'poetic' school. His violin concerto, in A minor (op. 101), and the piano concerto, in F minor (op. 114), are, however, in effect symphonies with solo instrument--again following Brahms' precept, but by a hopelessly thick and involved orchestration, he precludes anything like the interesting Brahmsian dialogue or discussion between the two elements.

Of the mass of Reger's chamber music we should mention the five sonatas for violin and piano, besides four for violin alone (in the manner of J. S. Bach), in which he shows his contrapuntal skill to particular advantage; the three clarinet sonatas, notable for beautiful slow movements and characteristic Reger scherzos (which are usually either grotesque, boisterous or spookish); two trios, three string quartets, a string quintet, 'cello sonatas, two suites for piano and violin (of which the first, _Im alten Stil_, op. 93, is widely favored), and numerous other pieces for violin, piano, etc. Reger has essayed choral writing extensively, the _Gesang der Verklärten_ for five-part chorus and large orchestra (op. 71), _Die Nonnen_ (op. 112), and several series of 'Folk Songs' being but part of the output. The much-favored organ compositions, chorale fantasias, preludes and fugues and in various other forms sanctified by the great Bach, are too numerous to mention and the songs (over 200 in number) will receive notice in another chapter.

Of the minor composers who owe allegiance to the New German School of Wagner and Liszt we may name first those of the immediate circle at Weimar--Peter Cornelius, Hans von Bülow, Eduard Lassen, and Felix Draeseke. Of these Bülow and Lassen have been mentioned in