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Heldenleben would be in every way one of the masterpieces of musical composition if a literary error had not suddenly cut short the soaring flight of its most impassioned pages, at the supreme point of interest in the movement, in order to follow the programme; though, besides this, a certain coldness, perhaps weariness, creeps in towards the end.
But somehow the result is very satisfying. "Now doesn't that sound well?" said Strauss to me with a smile, just after he had finished conducting Heldenleben. But it is especially in Strauss's subjects that caprice and a disordered imagination, the enemy of all reason, seem to reign.
The sublime Adagio of the Ninth Symphony made him think of Cherubino. After the three crashing chords at the opening of the Symphony in C Minor, he called out: "Don't come in! I've some one here." He admired the Battle of Heldenleben because he pretended that it was like the noise of a motor-car. And always he had some image to explain each piece, a puerile incongruous image.
Compositions of the sort of "Till Eulenspiegel," "Tod und Verklärung" and "Ein Heldenleben," solidly made and yet both narrative and dramatic, place the symphonic poem in the category of legitimate musical forms. The themes of "Till" grow out of each other quite as do the themes of a Beethoven symphony or of "Tristan" or of "Parsifal."
It would be easy, if idle, to notice unmistakable reminiscences of France and Italy even in Strauss's most advanced works, such as Zarathustra and Heldenleben. Mendelssohn, Gounod, Wagner, Rossini, and Mascagni elbow one another strangely. But these disparate elements have a softer outline when the work is taken as a whole, for they have been absorbed and controlled by the composer's imagination.
And, like M. Colonne, he has brought the great German Kapellmeister among us Weingartner, Nikisch, and Richard Strauss, the last mentioned having directed the first performance in Paris of his symphonic poems, Zarathustra, Don Quixote, and Heldenleben, at the Lamoureux concerts.
Heldenleben is divided into six chapters: The Hero, The Hero's Adversaries, The Hero's Companion, The Field of Battle, The Peaceful Labours of the Hero, The Hero's Retirement from the World, and the Achievement of His Ideal. It is an extraordinary work, drunken with heroism, colossal, half barbaric, trivial, and sublime.
This idealism is at first religious, as in Tod und Verklärung, and tender and compassionate as a woman, and full of youthful illusions, as in Guntram. Then it becomes vexed and indignant with the baseness of the world and the difficulties it encounters. How Strauss's laugh whips and stings us in Zarathustra! How his will bruises and cuts us in Heldenleben!
If that good Oulibicheff pretends to see the burning of Moscow in a discord in the first Heroic, what would he find here? What scenes of burning towns, what battlefields! Besides that there is cutting scorn and a mischievous laughter in Heldenleben that is never heard in Beethoven. There is, in fact, little kindness in Strauss's work; it is the work of a disdainful hero.
The battle in "Ein Heldenleben" pictures war really; the whistling, ironical wind-machine in "Don Quixote" satirizes dreams bitingly as no music has done; the orchestra describes the enthusiastic Don recovering from his madness, and smiles a conclusion; in "Also Sprach Zarathustra" it piles high the tomes of science, and waltzes with the Superman in distant worlds.
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