While Strauss with almost audacious boldness is leading toward the enharmonic possibilities of an augmented scale, the more conservative but no less ingenious Reger is looking back to his beloved Bach, and showing what, through a greatly extended key relationship, that master might have accomplished with the good old semitones. Eschewing programme music, and all else demanding literary elucidation, Reger will, to the tone-poems of his rival, offset a fugue or a sonata ultra enough for any save the disciples of Strauss and Debussy.
Like Strauss, Debussy is in no wise to be ignored, but always and wholly to be reckoned with in an estimate of advanced methods. Paradoxical at first thought is the fact that Debussy, whose measures abound in unresolved discords of ultra-modern origin, should found his music not uniformly on the major and the minor scales, but, by preference, largely on the old church modes. This reversion to the mediæval indicates a period of crisis wherein the beam fluctuates between the extremes of old and new tonal methods. Dispensing with the size and blare of the modern orchestra, and shunning, as if an obsession, the Wagnerian models, Debussy will not for one brief moment permit in the lyric drama such outbursts of vocal melody as crown the climaxes of «Lohengrin,» and the passionate love scenes of «Tannhäuser.» And this for the specific reason that «Melody is almost anti-lyric, and powerless to express the constant change of emotional life. Melody is suitable only for the song which confirms a fixed sentiment.»
While Strauss is held to be the lineal successor of Liszt, he is in fact a compound of various modern tendencies. In him we find the philosophy of Nietzsche, the impressionism of Manet, and the realism of which De Maupassant and Zola and Whitman and the youthful Swinburne were exponents; a realism which, because it over-emphasizes the erotic, the pathological, and the ugly, misinterprets man and nature, and so betrays the characteristics of decadent art.
What would have been the attitude of Wagner toward Strauss may be inferred from his caustic attacks on Berlioz whose music he called foolish and eccentric; and yet, as a producer of novel effects he himself was much indebted to the French composer, and, in turn, was no small factor in the formation of one whom Strauss' disciples deem the greater Richard. Notwithstanding which, we affirm that Strauss is more closely related to Liszt whose talents, both in pianoforte and orchestral composition, tended to virtuoso display more than to the utterance of original and lofty ideas.