United States or Jordan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
They had a fairly good string orchestra at Frayne that year, and one of Strauss's most witching waltzes "Sounds from the Vienna Woods" had just been begun as father and daughter entered. A dozen people, men and women both, saw them and noted what followed.
In considering Strauss's music as a whole, one is at first struck by the diversity of his style. The North and the South mingle; and in his melodies one feels the attraction of the sun. Something Italian had crept into Tristan; but how much more of Italy there is in the work of this disciple of Nietzsche. The phrases are often Italian and their harmonies ultra-Germanic.
He there found his sister spinning round with Clarendon to one of Strauss's waltzes; and Sir Henry and his partner seated themselves on one of the benches, watching the smiling faces as they whirled past them. It was a melancholy thought to Delme, how soon Emily's brow would be clouded, were he to breathe one word of George's illness and despondency.
She had already translated Strauss's "Life of Jesus" in a manner that was acceptable to the author. When Ralph Waldo Emerson came to Coventry to lecture, he was entertained at the same house where Miss Evans was stopping.
There is no position so absurd that it cannot be easily made to look plausible, if the strictly scientific method of investigation is once departed from. But if I had been in Strauss's place, and had wished to make out a case against Christianity without much heed of facts, I should not have done it by a theory of hallucinations.
But it is probable that Strauss's desire for incessant gain is a sort of perversion, a mania that has gotten control over him because his energies are inwardly prevented from taking their logical course, and creating works of art. Luxury-loving as he is, Strauss has probably never needed money sorely.
If we imagine the same riotous license in the realm of tonal noise, cacophony, that is, where the aim is not to enchant, but to frighten, bewilder, or amaze; to give some special foil to sudden beauty; or, last of all, for graphic touch of story, we have another striking element of Strauss's art.
One cannot help feeling her eminently a buxom, opulent Berliner, the wife, say, of the proprietor of a large department store; a heavy lady a good deal less "dämonisch" and "perverse" than she would like to have it appear. But there are moments when one feels as though Strauss's heroine were not even a Berliner, or of the upper middle class.
Perhaps one of the greatest charms of Strauss's art is that we are able to watch the rent in the dark clouds of German polyphony, and see shining through it the smiling line of an Italian coast and the gay dancers on its shore. This is not merely a vague analogy.
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.
Word Of The Day