After a week of Richard Strauss at Stuttgart one begins to entertain a profound respect for the originality of Richard Wagner. And Wagner during his embattled career was liberally accused of plagiarism, of drawing heavy drafts upon the musical banking houses of Beethoven, Weber, Marschner, Schubert, and how many others! Indeed, one of the prime requisites of success for a composer is to be called a borrower of other men's ideas. The truth is that there are only thirty-six dramatic situations and only seven notes in the scale, and all the possible permutations will not prevent certain figures, melodic groups, or musical moods from recurrence. Therefore, to say that Richard Strauss is a deliberate imitator of Wagner would be to restate a very common exaggeration. He is inconceivable without Wagner; nevertheless, he is individual. All his musical life he has been dodging Wagner and sometimes he succeeds in whipping his devil so far around the stump that he becomes himself, the glorious Richard Strauss of Don Quixote, of Till Eulenspiegel, of Hero's Life, and Elektra. But it may be confessed without much fear of contradiction that for him Wagner is his model—even in Salome, where the head of John the Baptist is chanted to the tune of Donner's motive from Rheingold.

At the Stuttgart festival, in 1912, which endured a week, I was struck by the Wagner obsession in the music of his only legitimate successor. To alter an old quotation, we may say: He who steals my ideas steals trash: ideas are as cheap and plentiful as potatoes in season; but he who steals my style takes from me the only true thing I possess. Now, Richard Strauss in addition to being a master of form, rather of all musical forms, is also the master-colourist of the orchestra. No one, not even Wagner, o'ertops him in this respect, though Wagner and Berlioz and Liszt showed him the way. Why, then, does he lean so heavily on Wagner, not alone on his themes—for Strauss is, above all, a melodist—but on his moods; in a word, the Wagnerian atmosphere? I noted that wherever a situation analogous to one in the Wagnerian music-drama presented itself the music of the protean younger Richard was coloured by memories of the elder composer. For example, in Ariadne at Naxos, the heroine is discovered outstretched on her island in the very abandonment of despair. We hear faint echoes of the last pages of Tristan and Isolde; no sooner do three women begin to sing than is conjured up a vision (aural, of course) of the Rhine maidens. In Feuersnot the legendary tone was unavoidable, yet there is too much of Die Meistersinger in this early work. Does a duenna appear with the heroine, at once you are reminded of Eva and Magdalena; and in the balcony scene, so different in situation from Lohengrin, Elsa nevertheless peers from behind the figure of Diemut. As for the lovers, Kunrad and Diemut, they, taking advantage of the darkness, as Mr. Henderson once remarked of another opera, Azrael, appropriated the musical colour—let me put the case mildly—of the duo of Walther and Eva. Wagner dead remains the imperious tyrant, a case of musical mortmain, the lawyers would put it; a hand reaching from his grave dictating the doings of the living. The great chorus in Feuersnot, after the fires are extinguished, because of the Alberich-like curse of Kunrad, is not without suggestions from the street fight in Die Meistersinger, and the wild wailings of the Walkyrie brood. Thus, if you are looking for reminiscences, I know of few composers whose work, vast and varied as it is, will afford such chances of spearing a Wagner motive as it appears for a moment on the swift and boiling stream of the Strauss orchestral narration. But if you have attained the age of discretion you will not ask too much, forget such childish and sinister play, and enjoy to the full the man's extraordinary gift of music-making.

For Richard Strauss is an extraordinary musician. To begin with, he doesn't look like a disorderly genius with rumpled hair, but is the mildest-mannered man who ever scuttled another's score and smoked Munich cigars or played "skat." And then he loves money! What other composer, besides Handel, Haydn, Mozart—yes, and also Beethoven—Gluck, Meyerbeer, Verdi, Puccini, so doted on the box-office? Why shouldn't he? Why should he enrich the haughty music publisher or the still haughtier intendant of the opera-house? As a matter of fact, if R. Strauss were in such a hurry to grow rich, he would write music of a more popular character. It would seem, then, that he is a millionaire malgrÉ lui, and that, no matter what he writes, money flows into his coffers. Indeed, an extraordinary man. Despite his spiritual dependence upon Wagner, and in his Tone-Poems, upon Liszt and Berlioz, he has a very definite musical personality. He has amplified, intensified the Liszt-Wagner music, adding to its stature, also exaggerating it on the purely sensuous side. That he can do what no other composer has done is proved by the score of his latest opera Ariadne at Naxos, given for the first time in Stuttgart. Here, with only thirty-six in the orchestra, a grand pianoforte and a harmonium included, he produces the most ear-ravishing tones, thus giving a negative to those who assert that without a gigantic orchestral apparatus he is ineffectual. Strauss received a sound musical education; he could handle the old symphonic form, absolute music, before he began writing in the vein modern; his evolution has been orderly and consistent. He looked before he leaped. His songs prove him to be a melodist, the most original since Brahms in this form. Otherwise, originality is conditioned. He is, for instance, not as original as Claude Debussy, who has actually said something new. Strauss, a rhetorician with enormous temperamental power, modifies the symphonic form of Liszt, boils down the Wagnerian trilogy into an hour and thirty minutes of seething, white-hot passion, and paints all the moods, human and inhuman, with incomparable virtuosity. It is a question of manner rather than matter. He is even a greater virtuoso than Hector Berlioz, and infinitely more tender; he is Meyerbeer in his opportunism, but there the comparison may be dropped, for old Meyerbeer could shake tunes out of his sleeve with more facility than does Strauss—and that is saying a lot. No, the style of Strauss is his own, notwithstanding his borrowings from Liszt and Wagner. He is not as original as either one, for he employs them both as his point of departure; but when you begin to measure up the power, the scope, and the versatility of his productions you are filled with a wholesale admiration for the almost incredible activity of the man, for his ambitions, his marvellous command of every musical form, above all, for his skill as a colourist.

Sometimes he hits it and sometimes he doesn't. After two hearings of Ariadne at Naxos in the smaller of the two new royal opera-houses at Stuttgart, I came to the conclusion that both composer and librettist, while greatly daring, had attempted the impossible, and therefore their work, despite its many excellencies, missed fire. In the first place, Herr Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the poet of Elektra and Der Rosercavalier, conceived the unhappy idea that MoliÈre's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme might be butchered to make a Straussian holiday and serve merely as a portico for the one-act opera that follows. But the portico turned out to be too large for the operatic structure. The dovetailing of play and music is at best a perilous proceeding. Every composer knows that. To give two acts of spoken MoliÈre (ye gods! and spoken in German) with occasional interludes of music, and then top it off with a mixture of opera seria and commedia del arte, is to invite a catastrophe. To be sure, the unfailing tact of Strauss in his setting of certain episodes of the MoliÈre play averted a smash-up, but not boredom. In the second place, the rather heavy fooling of the actors, excellent artists all, made MoliÈre as dull as a London fog. The piece is over two hundred and fifty years old; it must be played by French actors, therefore in the German version sadly suffers. I hear that it has been still further cut down, and at the present writing there is some gossip to the effect that Ariadne will be sung some day without the truncated version of MoliÈre by the ingenious Herr Hofmannsthal.

II

At the general rehearsal, the night before the opening, which was attended by the musical Élite of Europe (whatever that may mean), poets, critics, managers, composers, princely folk, musical parasites, and other east winds, as Nietzsche has it, the performance went on leaden feet. The acting of Victor Arnold (Berlin) as prosy old Jourdain just bordered on the burlesque; Camilla EibenschÜtz, not unknown to New York, cleared the air with her unaffected merriment. Strauss, after a delightful overture in the rococo manner of GrÉtry, contributes some fascinating dance measures, a minuetto, a polonaise, a gavotte, and a march. The table-music is wholly delightful. A brilliant episode is that of the fencing-master, who is musically pictured by a trumpet and pianoforte (with Max von Pauer at the keyboard). Nothing could be more dazzling. You hear the snapping of the foil in the hand of the truculent bully. The music that accompanies the tailor is capital, as are also the two dances—parodies of the dances in Salome and Elektra—for the kitchen boy, who leaps out of a huge omelette (like the pie-girl years ago in naughty New York), and for a tailor's apprentice. These were both danced with seductive charm by the youthful Grete Wiessenthal (Vienna), and were the bright particular spot of the play.

After a transition, not particularly well done, the curtains part and disclose a stage upon a stage, a problematic question under the most favourable conditions. Herr Jourdain makes by-remarks and interrupts the mimic opera. It is all as antique as the clown at the circus. Finally the opera gets under way and Ariadne publishes her views. Von Hofmannsthal's figure of the deserted lady is not a particularly moving one. Naturally, much must be allowed for the obviously artificial character of the piece. Max Reinhardt, maker of stagecraft and contriver of "atmosphere," has caught the exact shades. In the dinner scene of the play his stage was chastely beautiful. In the gaudy foliage of the exotic island, with the three chandeliers of a bygone epoch, the sharp dissonance of styles is indicated. Aubrey Beardsley would have rejoiced at this mingling of genres; at the figures of Harlequin, Scaramuccio; at the quaint and gorgeous costuming; at the Dryad, Naiad, Echo, and all the rest of seventeenth-century burlesque appanage. And yet things didn't go as they should have gone. The music is sparkling for the minor characters, and for Zerbinetta Strauss has planned an aria, the coloratura of which was to have made Mozart's famous aria for the Queen of Night seem like thirty cents. (I quote the exact phrase of an over-seas admirer.) Well, if Mozart's music is worth thirty cents, then the Zerbinetta aria is worth five; that is the proportion. The fact is the composer burlesques the old-fashioned scene and air with trills and other vocal pyrotechnics, but overdoes the thing. Frieda Hempel was to have sung the part and did not. Margarethe Siems (Dresden) could not. She was as spiritless as corked champagne. To give you an idea of the clumsy humour of the aria it is only necessary to relate that in the middle of the music the singer comes down to the footlights, points to her throat, tells the conductor that she is out of breath, that she must have breathing time if she is to go on. At the general rehearsal this vaudeville act found no favour and the singer was without doubt vocally distressed. An ominous noise from the direction of the conductor's desk (Strauss himself) caused her some embarrassment. She eventually got under way, leaving the audience in doubt as to the success of the experiment—the score shows that it is all in deadly earnest. But the foot-stamping of Strauss and his remarks reminded me of Gumprecht's description of Liszt's B-minor Sonata as the Invitation to Hissing and Stamping. Zerbinetta's vocal flower-garden must be shorn of many roses and lilies before it will be shapely.

Mizzi Jeritza (what ingratiating names they have in Vienna!) was the first Ariadne. In addition to being heartbroken over the perfidy of Theseus she was scared to death. It took some time before her voice grew warm, her acting less stiff. Her new wooer, Hermann Jadlowker (Vienna), was the Bacchus. As you have seen and heard him in New York, I need hardly add that he didn't "look" the part, though he sang with warmth. The three Rhine maidens on dry land were shrill and out of tune. But for the life of me I couldn't become interested in the sorrow and ecstasy, chiefly metaphysical, of this pair. The scheme is too remote from our days and ways. These young persons were make-believe, after all, and while they sonorously declaimed their passion—hers for a speedy death, his for the new life—under a canopy with mother-of-pearl lining (Reinhardt, too, can be very Teutonic), I didn't believe in them, and, I fear, neither did Strauss. He has written sparkling music, Offenbachian music, rainbow music and music sheerly humouristic, yet the entire production reminded one of a machine that wouldn't work at every point.

There were three performances besides the general rehearsal given at the low price of fifty marks (twelve dollars and fifty cents) a performance. One of the jokes of Strauss is to make music-critics pay for their seats. Screams of agony were heard all over the Continent as far north as Berlin, as far south as Vienna. A music-critic dearly hates to pay for a ticket. Hence the Till Eulenspiegel humour of R. Strauss. Hence the numerous "roasts" all his new works receive. He is the most unpopular composer alive with the critical confraternity. No wonder. I simply glory in him. Talk about blood from a stone! Strauss always makes money, even when his operas do not. Stuttgart, most charming of residency cities (it holds over two hundred and fifty thousand souls), was so crowded when I arrived that I was glad I had taken the hint of a friend and engaged a room in advance. The place simply overflowed with strangers. Certainly, I thought, they order these things better in Germany, and was elated because of the enthusiasm openly displayed over Strauss and the two noble opera-houses. All for Strauss? Alas! no. The Gordon Bennet balloon contest had attracted the majority, and until it was fought and done for there was no comfort to be had in cafÉ, restaurant, or hotel.

III

The performances of earlier Strauss works were in the main well attended. Oddly enough the poorest house—and it was far from empty—was that of The Rosecavalier. Possibly because the composer had gone over to TÜbingen to conduct a concert there (he always makes hay while the Strauss shines), there was so little enthusiasm displayed; possibly also because Max Schillings conducted. He is an excellent composer, a practical conductor, but he couldn't extract the "ginger" in the score—and it's full of it, full of fire, of champagne, of dreamy sentiment and valses that would turn gray with envy the hair of Johann Strauss if he hadn't thought of them before his namesake Richard. I didn't grow enthusiastic over the Stuttgart production, mainly a local affair. The honours of the evening rightfully belonged to Alwin Swoboda, who looked like De Wolf Hopper, but sang a trifle better. A favourite there is Iracema-BrÜgelmann; another, Erna Ellmenreich. One can sing, but acts amateurishly; the other screams, but is a clever actress. In Salome she was wonderful, singing out of tune as she often did. Her pose was hieratic as a sphinx when she watched the antics of the neurasthenic Herod. And her dance was one of the best I have yet seen, though Aino ActÉ's is said to rank them all. Wittich, Krull, Destinn, Rose, Walther, ActÉ, not one of them ever sang as sang Olive Fremstad at that memorable dress rehearsal of a certain Sunday morning in the Metropolitan Opera-House. Vocally she was the Salome of Richard Strauss, and she was lovely to behold. Salome herself should be a slight, cynical young person—half Flaubert, half Laforgue. Under Strauss the Salome is neither impossible nor vulgar. Very intense, an apparition rather than a human, she sounds the violet rays of eroticism (if I may be forgiven such a confusion of terms, of such a mixed metaphor). Another thing: the tempi were different from Campanini's—i. e., the plastic quality of the reading gave us new colours, new scents, new curves. Strauss is careless when he directs the works of others, but with his own he is all devotion. Take Elektra, for instance.

But I must finish my Salome budget. The Herod was not the actor that was Karl Burrian, but he sang better. His name is Josef Tyssen. The John was Herman Weil. Salome was preceded by Feuersnot, the folks-tone of which is an admirable foil to the overladen tints of Salome. (By the way, the sky in the latter opera showed the dipper constellation, Charles's Wain. Now, will some astronomer tell us if such a thing is possible in Syrian skies?) Herman Weil was the chief point of attraction. As for the so-called immoral ending of the composition, discovered by amateur critical prudes, to be forthright in my speech, it is all nonsense: it doesn't exist. But Wolzogen doesn't follow the lines of the Famine of Fire. His is a love scene with a joke for relief. The music is ultra-Wagnerian, the finale genuine Strauss, with its swelling melos, its almost superhuman forcing of the emotional line to the ecstatic point.

In Elektra, with the composer conducting, I again marvelled at the noisy, ineffective "reading" of a Hammerstein conductor, whose name I've forgotten. Yet New York has seen the best of Elektras, Mme. Mazarin—would that she had sung and danced here in Stuttgart! She might have surprised the composer—but New York is yet to hear Elektra as music-drama. Thus far I think (and it's only one man's opinion) that Strauss will endure because of his Till Eulenspiegel, Don Quixote, and Elektra. The mists are gathering over the other works; Salome is too theatrical, Feuersnot a pasticcio of Wagner, Guntram is out of the question (for ten years I've used it to sit on when I played Bach's C-major invention), and even the mighty major-minor opening of Also Sprach Zarathustra begins to pall. But not Don Quixote, so full of irony, humour, and pathos; not Elektra, in the strictest sense of the word a melodrama, and certainly not the prankish and ever inimitable Till Eulenspiegel. These abide by one, whereas the head in Salome has become vieux chapeau. When Ellmenreich sang to it that night it might have been a succulent boar's head on a platter for all the audience cared. (I fancy they would have preferred the boar to the saint—deadliest of all operatic bores, for ever intoning a variant of the opening bars of the Fidelio overture.)

But the Stuttgart Elektra performance will live long in my memory, but not because of the lady who assumed the title rÔle, Idenka Fassbender, of Munich. (She is not to be compared with the epileptic Mazarin for a moment. She is not Elektra vocally or histrionically.) The artiste of the evening was Anna von Mildenburg (Vienna), the wife of Herman Bahr, novelist and playwright, best known to America as the author of The Concert, one of David Belasco's productions. The Mildenburg is a giantess, with a voice like an organ. She is also an uneven singer, being hugely temperamental. The night in question she was keyed up to the occasion, and for the first time I realised the impressiveness of the part of Klytemnestra, its horrid tragic force, its abnormal intensity, its absolute revelation of the abomination of desolation. Mildenburg played it as a mixture of Lady Macbeth and Queen Gertrude, Hamlet's mother. And when she sang fortissimo all the Strauss horses and all the Strauss men were as supine, tonally speaking, as Humpty Dumpty. Her voice is of a sultry tonal splendour.

The two new opera-houses—also theatres—are set in a park, as should be art and opera houses. Facing the lake is the larger, a building of noble appearance, with a capacity for 1,400 persons seated. The smaller building only holds 800, but it looks as big as the old New York Sub-Treasury, and is twice as severe. Max Reinhardt calls the Hof-Oper the most beautiful in Europe. He is not exaggerating. A round 7,000,000 marks (about $1,750,000) was the cost of the buildings. His Majesty Wilhelm II, a liberal and enlightened monarch, dipped heavily into his private bank account. Stuttgart, according to the intendant, Graf zu Putlitz, must become the leading operatic and art city in Germany. The buildings are there, but not yet the singers. Dresden boasts its opera, and Berlin has better singers. Nevertheless, the pretty city, surrounded by villa-crowned hills, is to be congratulated on such classic temples of music and drama.

IV

Standing at the window of my hotel in Stuttgart, I watched a crowd before the Central railway station. Evidently something important was about to take place. What! Only the day previous all Stuttgart had strained its neck staring at a big Zeppelin air-ship. It was the week of the Gordon Bennett balloon race and every hotel, every lodging-house was full. It was also the Richard Strauss festival week, with the formal inauguration of the two magnificent opera-houses in the Schlossgarten. So it was not difficult to guess that an important visitor was due at the station. Hence the excitement, which increased when the King of WÜrtemberg dashed up in an open carriage, the royal livery and all the rest making a brave picture for his loyal subjects.

I've seen several kings and kaisers, but I've never seen one that looked "every inch a king." The German Kaiser outwardly is a well-groomed Englishman; Franz Josef of Austria—I've not met him since 1903, when our carriage wheels locked and he, a lovable old man, gallantly saluted my companion—he is everything but kingly; the late King Edward when at Marienbad was very much the portly type of middle-aged man you meet in Wall Street at three o'clock in the afternoon; while William II of WÜrtemberg is a pleasant gentleman, with "merchant" written over him. It is true he is an excellent man of affairs, harder working than any of his countrymen. He is also more democratic, and with his beloved Queen daily promenades the streets, lifting his hat half the time in response to the bowings and scrapings of patriotic Swabians.

The train arrived. The crowd grew denser. Zealous policemen intercepted passers-by from coming too close to the royal equipage; an old peasant woman carrying a market-basket was nearly guillotined by the harsh reproaches of the officers. She stumbled, but was shunted into the background just as the King reappeared in company with Prince August, greeted with wild cheering. The crowd, its appetite increasing by what it had fed on, remained. What next? Ah! The personal servants and valets of the youthful aristocrat from Berlin emerged from the station and entered a break. No baggage as yet. "Drat the folk!" I exclaimed, "why don't they clear out and leave the way for pedestrians." But it was not to be. A murmur arose when finally a baggage-wagon decked by the royal colours appeared. Trunks were piled on it, and only when it disappeared did the crowd melt. I thought of Gessler's cap on the pole and William Tell. Curiosity is perhaps the prime root of patriotism.

Finally, as too much Strauss palls, also too much Stuttgart. I first visited the pretty city in 1896 en route to Bayreuth, and on my return to New York I remember chiding Victor Herbert for leaving the place where he had completed his musical education. He merely smiled. He knew. So do I. A Residenzstadt finally ends in a half-mad desire to escape; anywhere, anywhere, only let it be a big town where the inhabitants don't stare at you as if you were a wild animal. Stuttgart is full of stare-cats (as is Berlin for that matter). And those hills that at first are so attractive—they hem in the entire city, which is bowl-shaped, in a valley—become monotonous. They stifle you. To live up there on the heights is another thing; then the sky is an accomplice in your optical pleasures, but below—especially when the days are rainy and the nights doleful, as they are in November—oh, then you cry: Let me see once more summer-sunlit Holland and its wide plains punctuated only by church spires and windmills!

Otherwise Stuttgart is an easy-going spot. It's cheaper than Dresden or Munich (though it was expensive during the Strauss week); the eating at the restaurants is about one-half the price of first-rate establishments in New York (and not as good by a long shot); lodgings are also cheap, and often nasty—Germany is not altogether hygienic, notwithstanding her superiority over America in matters musical; but the motor-cars are simply miraculous to the New Yorker accustomed to the bullies, bandits, and swindlers who pretend to be chauffeurs in our metropolis. For twenty-five cents you can ride nearly a half-hour in Stuttgart in cars faultlessly conducted. A two and a half hours' trip round the town—literally—in the hills, through the park cost seven marks (one dollar and seventy-five cents)—and even then the driver was distinctly apologetic when he showed his register.

Stuttgart, oddly enough, is a centre for all the engraving, etching, and mezzotint sales. I say, oddly, because the art museum contains the worst collection of alleged "old masters" I ever encountered off Fifth Avenue. Hardly an original in the whole lot, and then a third-rate specimen at that. But the engraving cabinets and the Rembrandt original drawings are justly celebrated. And now with the two new theatres, or opera-houses, Stuttgart ought soon to forge to the front as an art centre in Germany. Thanks to its energetic King and cultivated Queen.

The question with which I began this little talk—is Richard Strauss retrograding in his art?—may be answered by a curt negative. One broadside doesn't destroy such a record as Richard's. Like that sublime bourgeois Rubens, like that other sublime bourgeois Victor Hugo, like Bernini, to whose rococo marbles the music of Richard II is akin, he has essayed every department of his art. So expressive is he that he could set a mince-pie to music. (Why not, after that omelette in Ariadne?) So powerful is his imagination that he can paint the hatred of his epical Elektra or the half-mad dreams of Don Quixote. He is easily the foremost of living composers, and after he is dead the whirligig of fortune which has so favoured him may pronounce him dead for ever. But I doubt it.