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What! a God who would choose perpetual error, together with a striving after truth, and who would, perhaps, fall humbly at Strauss's feet and cry to him,"Take thou all Truth, it is thine!"? If ever a God and a man were ill-advised, they are this Straussian God, whose hobby is to err and to fail, and this Straussian man, who must atone for this erring and failing.
And so Strauss's music loses much of its point, for it claims to recall a series of adventures which we know nothing about Till crossing the market place and smacking his whip at the good women there; Till in priestly attire delivering a homely sermon; Till making love to a young woman who rebuffs him; Till making a fool of the pedants; Till tried and hung.
At home, or in the company of his equals, he may applaud with wild enthusiasm, but takes care not to put on paper how entirely Strauss's words are in harmony with his own innermost feelings.
Joseph Liggins; and finally, the public learnt on authority that the "gentleman of high church tendencies" was a lady; and that this lady was the same who had given a remarkable proof of mastery over both the German language and her own, but had certainly not established a reputation for orthodoxy, by a translation of Strauss's "Life of Jesus."
The most important figure in the world of German opera to-day is unquestionably that of Richard Strauss. This is not the place to dilate upon Strauss's achievements as a symphonic writer, which are sufficiently well known to the world at large. His first opera, 'Guntram' , was hardly more than an exercise in the manner of Wagner, and made comparatively little impression.
One of Strauss's waltzes, or Schubert's melodies played on the piano by the band-master completed the illusion; and yet we had only to rub off the thin incrustation of frozen vapour that covered the panes of the windows, to look out upon the gigantic and terrible forms of the icebergs dashed against each other by a black and broken sea, and the whole panorama of Polar nature, its awful risks, and its sinister splendours.
A band in a balcony began to play Strauss's Wiener Mad'l, the strains of music muffled by the dust, the lights, the movement of the audience, the pain in Lilla's breast.
But what is to be thought of the fact that the authoress of these tales is also the translator of Strauss's notorious book?
On my asking him what was the most amusing thing he had seen in America, he answered that it was a "sacred concert," on Sunday, at a church in Colorado Springs, in which the music of Strauss's waltzes and Offenbach's comic songs were leading features, the audience taking them all very solemnly. In the literary direction I found Prince John Galitzin's readings from French dramas delightful.
They were playing Strauss's Blue Danube, and the familiar strains of the delightful waltz were so infectious that both were seized by a desire to get up and dance. There was constant amusement, too, watching the crowd, with its many original and curious types.
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