Mediterranean sky; a music super-European, which would hold its own even by the dark sunsets of the desert; a music whose Soul is akin to the palm-trees; a music that knows how to live and move among great beasts of prey, beautiful and solitary; a music whose supreme charm is its ignorance of good and evil." For he came with some of the light and careless and arrogant tread, the intellectual sparkling, the superb gesture and port, of the musician of the new race. The man who composed such music, one knew, had been born on some sort of human height, in some cooler, brighter atmosphere than that of the crowded valleys. For in this music there beat a faster pulse, moved a lighter, fierier, prouder body, sounded a more ironic and disdainful laughter, breathed a rarer air, than had beat and moved and sounded and breathed in music. It made drunken with pleasant sound, with full rich harmonies, with exuberant dance and waltz movements. It seemed to adumbrate the arrival of a new sort of man, men of saner, sounder, more athletic souls and more robust and cool intelligence, a generation that was vitally satisfied, was less torn and belaboured by the inexpressible longings of the romantic world, a generation very much at home on the globe. For it had none of the restless, sick desire of Wagner, nope of his excessive pathos, his heaviness and stiff grandeur. It had come down off its buskins, was more easy, witty, diverting, exciting, popular and yet cerebral. Though it was obviously the speech of a complicated modern man, self-conscious, sophisticated, nervous, product of a society perhaps not quite so free and Nietzschean as it deemed itself, but yet cultivated and illuminated and refined, it nevertheless seemed healthful and good. The sweet broad diatonic idiom, the humour, the sleepy Bavarian accent, the pert, naive little folk-tunes it employed, the tranquil touching childlike tones, the close of Tod und Verklärung, with its wondrous unfolding of corrolla upon corrolla, were refreshing indeed after all the burning chromaticism of Wagner, the sultry air of Klingsor's wonder-garden.
And this music glittered with the sun. The pitch of Wagner's orchestra had after all been predominantly sober and subdued. But in the orchestra of Strauss, the colour-gamut of the plein-air painters got a musical equivalent. Those high and brilliant tints, these shimmering, biting tones, make one feel as though Strauss made music with the paint brush of a Monet or a Van Gogh. His trumpets are high and brilliant and silvery, his violins scintillant and
