Ariadne auf Naxos. He has become increasingly facile and unoriginal, has taken to quoting, unblushingly, Mendelssohn, Tchaikowsky, Wagner, even himself. His insensitivity has waxed inordinately, and led him to mix styles, to commingle dramatic and coloratura passages, to jumble the idioms of three centuries in a single work, to play all manner of pointless pranks with his art. His literary taste has grown increasingly uncertain. He who was once so careful in his choice of lyrics, and recognized the talents of such modern German poets as Birnham and Dehmel and Mackay, accepts librettos as dull and inartistic and precious as those with which Hofmannsthal is supplying him, and lends his art to the boring buffooneries of Der Rosenkavalier and Ariadne auf Naxos. Something in him has bent and been fouled and broken.
One thing at least the Strauss of the tone-poems indisputably was. He was freely, dazzlingly, daringly expressive. And this is what the Strauss of the last years thinly and rarely is. It is not Oscar Wilde's wax flowers of speech, nor the excessively conventionalized and stylized action of Salome, that bores one with Strauss's opera of that name. It is not even the libretto of Der Rosenkavalier, essentially coarse and boorish and insensitive as it is beneath all its powdered preciosity, that wearies one with Strauss's "Musical Comedy," or the hybrid, lame, tasteless form of Ariadne auf Naxos that turns one against that little monstrosity. It is the generally inexpressive and insufficient music in which Strauss has vested them. The music of Salome, for instance, is not even commensurable with Wilde's drama. It was the evacuation of an obsessive desire, the revulsion from a pitiless sensuality, that the poet had intended to procure through this representation. But Strauss's music, save in such exceptional passages as the shimmering, restless, nerve-sick opening page, or the beginning of the scene with the head, or certain other crimson patches, hampers and even negates the intended effect. It emasculates the drama with its pervasive prettiness, its lazy felicitousness where 1t ought to be monstrous and terrifying, its reminiscences of Mendelssohn, Tchaikowsky, and "Little Egypt." The lascivious and hieratic dance, the dance of the seven veils, is represented by a valse lent. Oftentimes, the score verges perilously on circus-music, recalls the side-shows at county fairs. No doubt, in so doing it weakens the odour exuded by Wilde's play. But if we must have an operatic Salome, it is but reasonable to demand that the composer in his
