The critical quarrel with Strauss is based upon three grounds: first, that he endeavors to make music tell a complete story; second, that he seeks materials which are unsuited to musical embodiment; and, third, that he writes ugly music. Composers have yielded to the temptations of their fancies since the earliest days. Away back in the fifteenth century, Jannequin tried to describe The Cries of Paris in four-part vocal polyphony. Later composers fashioned piano pieces which were supposed to tell whole histories. Ambros, the distinguished German historian of music, felt it incumbent on him to write a book to show where the communicative power of music ended and the aid of text must be called in. Wagner declared that music unassisted could go no further than Beethoven's symphonies, and that the last movement of the Ninth Symphony was a confession of that fact. It was long ago conceded that music could depict the broader emotions. It has generally been denied that it could go into details or explain to the hearer the causes of the feelings which it expressed. Yet by the judicious use of titles and the establishment of a connection between a composition and some well-known drama or poem, the imagination of the hearer is stimulated to conceive the meaning of many details otherwise incomprehensible. Strauss goes the furthest in the elaboration of detail. He uses numerous themes, each a guiding motive in the Wagnerian sense, and he asks us to follow them through a myriad of musical workings out, all having direct significance in telling a story. The stories are not without unpleasant incidents and the music is rasping in its ugliness at times. But this is not for us to judge. What is said of the music of Strauss now was said twenty-five years ago of Wagner's. But a few years, and the acidulated croakings of the singer of Munich may be as sweet upon our ears as now are the endless melodic weavings of "Tristan und Isolde."