Tannhäuser and Parsifal, had gone out of him, this slender sleepy young Bavarian with the pale curly hair and moustaches had commenced to develop the expressive power of music amazingly, was making the orchestra speak wonderfully as it had never spoken before. Under his touch the symphony, that most rigid and abstract and venerable of forms, was actually displaying some of the novel's narrative and analytical power, its literalness and concreteness of detail. It was describing the developments of a character, was psychologizing as it had hitherto done only in conjunction with poetry or the theatre. Strauss had made it represent the inflammations of the sex illusion, comment on Nietzsche and Cervantes, recount the adventures, somersaults, and end of a legendary rascal, portray a hero of our time. He had made all these intellectual concepts plastic in a music of a brilliance and a sprightliness and mordancy that not many classic symphonies can rival. Other and former composers, no doubt, had dreamt of making the orchestra more concretely expressive, more precisely narrative and descriptive. The Pastoral Symphony is by no means the first piece of deliberately, confessedly programmatic music. And before Strauss, both Berlioz and Liszt had experimented with the narrative, descriptive, analytical symphony. But it was only with Strauss that the symphonic novel was finally realized.
Neither Berlioz nor Liszt had really embodied their programmes in living music. Liszt invariably sacrificed programme to sanctioned musical form. For all his radicalism, he was too trammelled by the classical concepts, the traditional musical schemes and patterns to quite realize the symphony based on an extra-musical scheme. His symphonic poems reveal how difficult it was for him to make his music follow the curve of his ideas. In Die Ideale, for instance, for the sake of a conventional close, he departed entirely from the curve of the poem of Schiller which he was pretending to transmute. The variations in which he reproduced Lamartine’s verse are stereotyped enough. When was there a time when composers did not deform their themes into amorous, rustic, and warlike variations? The relation between the pompous and somewhat empty Lament and Triumph and the unique, the distinct thing that was the life of Torquato Tasso, is outward enough. And even the Mazeppa, in which Liszt's virtuosic genius stood him in good stead, makes one feel as though Liszt could never quite keep his eye on the fact, and become finally
