Usually when musical composers have ventured out of the beaten path, just found by the critics after much thorny wandering through the jungle of error, the cry has been that they were going astray. The poor critics have never been able to understand how any genius could depart from the beaten path without being lost in the woods, as they themselves generally are. In nine cases out of ten the composer who does so depart is lost, and hence the critic's calling is not altogether one of sorrow. The prophet who has ninety per cent of "I told you so" in his retrospective views is not wholly a subject for commiseration. But there is that tenth man, who is always an explorer, and who always sets to cutting new paths through the forest. The critic says, "You're going to get lost," and he replies, "I may lose you, but not myself." After a time he comes out of the forest into a new and beautiful land, and the critic, limping slowly and painfully after him, murmurs, "You were right: it is good for us to be here." And so the music critics, who long ago reduced their comments on Beethoven and Weber and Schubert and Schumann to an exact science, and who have made it possible for any old reader to predict precisely what will be said on the morning after a purely classical concert, have fallen over the music of Strauss into a confusion like unto that of the army of Pharaoh suddenly overtaken by the waters of the Red Sea. It was about twelve years ago that this music began to echo through the concert-rooms of America. Strauss had begun to write early in life, but his first works were imitative of the older masters. The real Richard Strauss began to reveal himself in 1887, when he produced "Macbeth," the first of his series of symphonic poems. The others are Don Juan (1888), Death and Apotheosis (1889), Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks (1895), Thus Spake Zarathustra (1896), Don Quixote (1897), and A Hero's Life (1898). The "Symphonia Domestica," which is really a tone poem, was produced at Carnegie Hall, New York, March 21, 1904. What has Strauss done in these works to "so get the start of the majestic world"? He has asked us to listen to orchestral compositions made with wide deviations from the established outlines, with a new melodic idiom, with a harmony which frequently affects the ear precisely as lemon juice affects the palate, with instrumental combinations of overpowering sonority and harshness, and, above all, with attempts at a detailed definiteness of expression which demand the closest application of the hearer's powers of analysis.