What is the difference between classical and modern music? Write a chapter or a book on it, and the difference still remains just this: Classical music is the expression of beauty; modern music the expression of life and truth. Modern music seems entering upon a new era with Strauss, which does not necessarily exclude beauty. It is beginning to illustrate itself, so to speak, like the author-artist who can both write and draw. To-day, music not only expresses truth, but represents it pictorially. How long will the time be in coming when a composer will wave his bâton, the orchestra strike a chord--and we be not only listeners but also beholders, hearing the chord, and seeing at the same time its image floating above the orchestra?
In his "Melomaniacs," the most remarkable collection of musical stories I have read, Mr. Huneker has a tale called "A Piper of Dreams," the most advanced piece of musical fiction I know of. This piper of dreams produces music which is _seen_. "Do you know why you like it?" Mr. Huneker asked me, when I told him how intensely I admired the story. "Because," he continued, "the hero of the story is a Richard Strauss."
Of course, this brilliantly written story was a daring incursion into a seemingly impossible future. Yet it points a tendency. When shall we have music that can be seen? Considering how closely related are the laws of acoustics and optics, is a "Piper of Dreams" so visionary? Who knows but that the music of the future may be visible sound--the work of a piper of dreams? Sometimes, when listening to Strauss, I think Mr. Huneker's _Piper_ is tuning up.
Richard Strauss's tone poems are large in plan. In fact they are colossal. They show him to be a man of great intellectual activity, as well as an inspired composer. The latter, of course, is the test by which a musical work stands or falls. No matter how intellectually it is planned, if it is inadequate musically it fails. But if it is musically inspired, it gains vastly in effect when it rests on a brain basis.
That Richard Strauss is the most significant figure in the musical world to-day seems to me too patent to admit of discussion. The only question to be considered is, how has he become so? The question is best answered by showing what a Richard Strauss tone poem is. Take "Thus Spake Zarathustra" and "A Hero's Life." Without going into an elaborate discussion I must insist that, to consider Richard Strauss as in any way a development from Berlioz or Liszt, shows a deplorable unfamiliarity with his works. Berlioz wrote program music. Liszt wrote program music. Richard Strauss writes program music. But this point of resemblance is wholly superficial. Berlioz admittedly strove to adhere to the orthodox symphonic form. Liszt aptly named his own productions "symphonic poems." They are much freer in form than Berlioz's, and possibly pointed the way to the Richard Strauss tone poem. But when we examine the musical kernel, the difference at once is apparent. Polyphony, that is, the simultaneous interweaving of many themes, was foreign to Berlioz and Liszt. Their style is mainly homophonic. Richard Strauss is a polyphonic composer second not even to Wagner, whose system of leading motives in his music-dramas made his scores such marvellous polyphonic structures. Such, too, are the scores of Richard Strauss's tone poems. None but a master of polyphony could have attempted to express in music what Richard Strauss has expressed. For are not his tone poems literally tone dramas?