After a week of Richard Strauss at Stuttgart one begins to entertain a profound respect for the originality of Richard Wagner. And Wagner during his embattled career was liberally accused of plagiarism, of drawing heavy drafts upon the musical banking houses of Beethoven, Weber, Marschner, Schubert, and how many others! Indeed, one of the prime requisites of success for a composer is to be called a borrower of other men\'s ideas. The truth is that there are only thirty-six dramatic situations and only seven notes in the scale, and all the possible permutations will not prevent certain figures, melodic groups, or musical moods from recurrence. Therefore, to say that Richard Strauss is a deliberate imitator of Wagner would be to restate a very common exaggeration. He is inconceivable without Wagner; nevertheless, he is individual. All his musical life he has been dodging Wagner and sometimes he succeeds in whipping his devil so far around [Pg 154] the stump that he becomes himself, the glorious Richard Strauss of Don Quixote, of Till Eulenspiegel, of Hero\'s Life, and Elektra. But it may be confessed without much fear of contradiction that for him Wagner is his model—even in Salome, where the head of John the Baptist is chanted to the tune of Donner\'s motive from Rheingold.

At the Stuttgart festival, in 1912, which endured a week, I was struck by the Wagner obsession in the music of his only legitimate successor. To alter an old quotation, we may say: He who steals my ideas steals trash: ideas are as cheap and plentiful as potatoes in season; but he who steals my style takes from me the only true thing I possess. Now, Richard Strauss in addition to being a master of form, rather of all musical forms, is also the master-colourist of the orchestra. No one, not even Wagner, o\'ertops him in this respect, though Wagner and Berlioz and Liszt showed him the way. Why, then, does he lean so heavily on Wagner, not alone on his themes—for Strauss is, above all, a melodist—but on his moods; in a word, the Wagnerian atmosphere? I noted that wherever a situation analogous to one in the Wagnerian music-drama presented itself the music of the protean younger Richard was coloured by memories of the elder composer. For example, in Ariadne at Naxos, the heroine is discovered outstretched on her island in the very abandonment of despair. We hear faint [Pg 155] echoes of the last pages of Tristan and Isolde; no sooner do three women begin to sing than is conjured up a vision (aural, of course) of the Rhine maidens. In Feuersnot the legendary tone was unavoidable, yet there is too much of Die Meistersinger in this early work. Does a duenna appear with the heroine, at once you are reminded of Eva and Magdalena; and in the balcony scene, so different in situation from Lohengrin, Elsa nevertheless peers from behind the figure of Diemut. As for the lovers, Kunrad and Diemut, they, taking advantage of the darkness, as Mr. Henderson once remarked of another opera, Azrael, appropriated the musical colour—let me put the case mildly—of the duo of Walther and Eva. Wagner dead remains the imperious tyrant, a case of musical mortmain, the lawyers would put it; a hand reaching from his grave dictating the doings of the living. The great chorus in Feuersnot, after the fires are extinguished, because of the Alberich-like curse of Kunrad, is not without suggestions from the street fight in Die Meistersinger, and the wild wailings of the Walkyrie brood. Thus, if you are looking for reminiscences, I know of few composers whose work, vast and varied as it is, will afford such chances of spearing a Wagner motive as it appears for a moment on the swift and boiling stream of the Strauss orchestral narration. But if you have attained the age of discretion you will not ask too much, forget such childish and sinister play, [Pg 156] and enjoy to the full the man\'s extraordinary gift of music-making.

For Richard Strauss is an extraordinary musician. To begin with, he doesn\'t look like a disorderly genius with rumpled hair, but is the mildest-mannered man who ever scuttled another\'s score and smoked Munich cigars or played "skat." And then he loves money! What other composer, besides Handel, Haydn, Mozart—yes, and a............