11. MUSIC OF THE 20TH CENTURY The 2oth century inherited the last development of the 19th in the symphonic poems and operas of Richard Strauss (q.v.). Much acrid controversy at first raged around the details of his style which dashed through all the traffic regulations of classical part-writing. And nothing was easier than to identify all carping critics with Beckmesser and to accept humbly Strauss's own self-portrait as the hero of Ein Heldenleben. The elements that were sensational in Strauss's symphonic poems have become so familiar that we are in some danger of underestimating the im portance of these works as real achievements of the problem in which Liszt failed ; not the trivial problem of programme-music, but the vital problem of writing purely instrumental music on the Wagnerian time-scale. The power of composition in these works is unquestionable and remains eminent in their facile after math, the Alpen-Sinfonie, which, designed before the World War, appeared in 1915. But Strauss had eclipsed the fame of his symphonic works by his operas, which began to be important with Salome (1905), a setting of Oscar Wilde's play. Then came the long and fruitful partnership with Hugo von Hofmannsthal which is still in being, and has enabled poet and musician to prove the possibility of many different kinds of modern opera, Wagnerian and non-Wagnerian. The purity of the Straussian metal has been strongly alloyed with worldly wisdom in every phase of Strauss's career; in the period of the good boy of the conservatoire; in the romantic symphonic poet of Tod and Verkleirung; in the timely musical adaptation of Wilde while he was still a new discovery on the German stage; in the seizing of the opportunity presented by Hofmannsthal's Elektra after its triumph as a play ; and not least in the present phase of naïve melodiousness. Nevertheless Die Frau ohne Schatten is perhaps the most noble gesture in music since the World War. From the twilight of fin-de-siecle and recent erotic art and from its always selfish and sometimes abnormal sexual preoccupations, Die Frau ohne Schatten breaks away with a heroic plea for normal love and life, unassailable by any cavil that does not write itself down as ignoble, musically, Strauss's grandest and most grandly realised opportunity for beauty. As a theatrical spectacle it is a
gorgeous pantomime, no more disturbed by its allegorical meaning than Die Zauberflote, which it in some ways intentionally re sembles. Die aegyptische Helena (1928) descends from this high level into all manner of cleverness in its stage-technique and of facility in its music.
Whatever has been gained in the 2oth century music, Strauss presents an almost solitary example of mastery of movement. Elsewhere, neither in academic teaching nor in new musical developments does any sense of movement seem to be cultivated. The vast cosmic movement of Wagner is attempted in Bruckner's fashion, by composers who seem to think that huge dimensions can impress us as huge without any reference to human measure ments. The best work of Sibelius shows a true sense of cosmic movement and a real freedom and economy in the forms by which this is expressed. With other modern composers the most curious musical inhibition is that which makes them continue to write sonata works in the four classical movements with a rigidity unknown to Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven, though the modern matter has no more connection with sonata form than Wagnerian music-drama has with the da capo aria.
This lack of necessity in form is nowhere more conspicuous than in the whole work of Max Reger who is usually regarded as the Brahms of the loth century. His untimely death happened when he was evidently about to change his style. He was a pupil of the most mechanically-systematized musical scholar of recent times, Hugo Riemann; and anyone who has groaned in spirit at the sight of one of Riemann's instructive editions of a piece of classical music may easily recognise in Reger the traces of Rie mann's teaching. Every external feature of the classical art-forms is present without any trace of the classical reasons for it. Every thing has been worked out from one detail to the next as if it had been plotted on squared paper ready marked by someone else with points of reference.