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Updated: June 6, 2025
As against the pedantry of Bruckner the style of Strauss is almost welcome in its frank pursuit of effects which are at least grateful in themselves. Strauss makes hardly a pretence at having melodic ideas. They serve but as pawns or puppets for his harmonic and orchestral mise-en-scène. He is like a play-wright constructing his plot around a scenic design.
So the less a song is burdened with words the better. In the classic style of Hindustan the words are of no account and leave the melody to make its appeal in its own way. Vocal music reaches its perfection when the melodic form is allowed to develop freely, and carry our consciousness with it to its own wonderful plane.
You have in these pictures the romances of the human mind made irresistible with melodic certainty. They are chansons sans paroles, sung to the syrinx in Sicilian glades. I feel that it is our own romantic land transposed into terms of classical metre. The color is mostly Greek, and the line is Greek.
His preference for unrelated tones in his melodic scheme led to the dissociated harmonies of his operatic score, and this same Boris Godounow has much influenced French music, as I have pointed out earlier in this volume a source at which Claude Debussy drank not to mention Dukas, Ravel, and others whose more sophisticated scores prove this.
Debussy has defended his methods with point and directness. "I have been reproached," he says, "because in my score the melodic phrase is always in the orchestra, never in the voice. I tried, with all my strength and all my sincerity, to identify my music with the poetical essence of the drama.
Almost any really good melodic line, especially a cantilena, will sound with a fitting harmonic development. Violinists of former days like Spohr, Rode and Paganini were more intent on composing music out of the violin! The modern idea lays stress first of all on the idea in music.
And strangely, in point of actual music, we cannot fail to find an emptier, a more grandiose manner in all these symphonic poems than in the two symphonies. It seems as if an unconscious sense of the greater nobility of the classic medium drove Liszt to a far higher inspiration in his melodic themes. Yet we cannot deny the brilliant, dazzling strokes, and the luscious harmonies.
He overshot the mark in this for he did not see that in singing the expression of a note is modified by the harmonic scheme which accompanies it. It must be recognized, in addition, that many times Grétry was carried away by his melodic inventiveness and forgot his own principles so that he relegated his care for declamation to second place.
Nature had fortunately endowed him with precisely the equipment necessary for the man who was to reform Italian opera. The school of Paisiello, notwithstanding its many merits, had several grievous weaknesses, of which the most prominent were uniformity of melodic type, nerveless and conventional orchestration, and intolerable prolixity.
After the D major episode there are two bars of anonymous modulation these bars creak on their hinges and the first subject reappears in F, then climbs to F sharp, thence merges into a glittering melodic organ-point, exciting, brilliant, the whole subsiding into an echo of earlier harmonies. The final octaves are marked fortissimo which always seems brutal.
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