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However, Strauss is not the only member of the post-Wagnerian group, but he is the chief one who has kept his individual head above water in the welter and chaos of the school. Where are Cyrill Kistner, Hans Sommer, August Bungert, and the others? Humperdinck is a mediocrity, even more so than Puccini. And what of the banalities of Bruckner?
And so, believing that he was about to do for the music of the post-Wagnerian period what Brahms had done for that of the romantic period, the musical conservatives and traditionalists rallied to him. He was acclaimed by a large public lineal successor of the three great "B's" of music.
The great cantata, "Gurrelieder," the symphonic setting of Jens Peter Jacobsen's romance in lyrics, might even stand as the grand finale of the whole post-Wagnerian, ultra-romantic period, and represent the moment at which the whole style and atmosphere did its last heroic service.
Just as Hofmannsthal imitates Hogarth, so Strauss imitates Mozart, affects his style, his turns, his spirit; inserts a syrupy air in the style of Haendel or Méhul in the first act; and jumbles Mozart with modern comic-opera waltzes, Haendel with post-Wagnerian incantations. And like Hofmannsthal's libretto, the score remains a superficial and formless thing.
The orchestral poem after Maeterlinck's "Pelléas" is also ultra-romantic and post-Wagnerian. The trumpet theme, the "Pelléas" theme, for instance, is lineally descended from the "Walter von Stolzing" and "Parisfal" motives. The work reveals Schoenberg striving to emulate Strauss in the field of the symphonic poem; striving, however, in vain.
And we of our generation have finally found the music that is so creatively infecting for us. We have found the music of the post-Wagnerian epoch. It is our music. For we are the offspring of the generation that assimilated Wagner. We, too, are the reaction from Wagner. Through the discovery we have come to learn that music can give us sensations different than those given us by Wagner's.
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