The classical period of music dominated by the symphony--Its esthetic purpose defined--A symphonic witticism--Some comment on form in music--Divisions of the symphony established by Haydn--Artless grace and beauty of Mozart's symphonies--Beethoven to the fore--Climaxes and rests--The Ninth Symphony--Schubert's genius--Mendelssohn and Schumann--Liszt's symphonies and symphonic poems--Other symphonists--Wagner not supposed to have been a purely orchestral composer, yet the greatest of all 197
One of the most original and individual of composers--A student, not a copyist, of Wagner--Independent intellectual basis for his art--Originator of the tone poem--Unhampered by even the word "symphonic"--Means much to the musically elect--Not a juggler with the orchestra--A modern of moderns--Technical difficulties, but not impossibilities in his works--"Thus Spake Zarathustra" and other scores--Life and truth, not mere beauty, the burden of modern music--Huneker's "Piper of Dreams"--"Zarathustra" and "A Hero's Life" described--An intellectual force in music--"A Hero's Life" Strauss's "Meistersinger"--Tribute to Wagner in "Feuersnot"--Performances of Richard Strauss's scores in America--His symphony in F minor (1883) had its first performance anywhere, under Theodore Thomas--Straussiana--Boyhood anecdotes--Scribbled scores on schoolbook covers--Still at school when first symphony was played in public--Studied with Von Bülow--Married his Freihild--Ideals of the highest 207
Strophic and "composed through"--Schubert the first song composer to require consideration; also the greatest--Early struggles--Too poor to buy music paper--Becomes a school-teacher--Impatient under drudgery--Publishers hold aloof--Fortune for a song, but not for him--History of "The Erlking"--How it was composed--Written down as fast as pen could travel--Tried over the same evening--The famous dissonances--As sung by Lilli Lehmann--Schubert only eighteen years old when he composed "The Erlking"--His marvelous fecundity--Died at thirty-one, yet wrote six hundred songs and many other works--Schumann's individuality--Distinguished from Schubert--Not the same proportion of great songs--The best composed during his wooing of Clara--Phases of Franz's genius--Traces of his knowledge and admiration of Bach--Choice of keys--Objected to transpositions--Pitiable physical disabilities--Brahms a profound thinker in music--Jensen, Rubinstein, Grieg, Chopin, Wagner--Liszt one of the greatest of song composers--Richard Strauss, Hugo Wolf and others 231