And this music glittered with the sun. The pitch of Wagner's orchestra had, after all, been predominantly sober and subdued. But in the orchestra of Strauss, the color-gamut of the _plein-air_ painters got a musical equivalent. Those high and brilliant tints, these shimmering, biting tones, make one feel as though Strauss made music with the paint-brush of a Monet or a Van Gogh. His trumpets are high and brilliant and silvery, his violins scintillant and electric, at moments winding a lazy, happy, smoke-blue thread through the sunburnt fabric of the score. His horns glow with soft, fruity timbres. The new sweetness of color which he attains in his songs, the pale gold of "Morgen," the rose of the Serenade, the mild evening blue of "Traum durch die Daemmerung," shimmers throughout his orchestra scores. Never have wind instruments sounded more richly, dulcetly, than in that "Serenade fuer dreizehn Blaeser." At a first hearing of "Also Sprach Zarathustra," it seemed as though the very dayspring had descended into the orchestra to make that famous, brassy opening passage. For here, in the hand of Strauss, the orchestra begins to round out its form and assume its logical shape. The various families of instruments are made independent; often play separately. The shattering brass of which Berlioz had dreamt is realized. Violas d'amore, hecklephones, wind-machines, are introduced into the band; the familiar instruments are used in unfamiliar registers. Through the tone-poems of Strauss, the orchestral composer for the first time has a suitable palette, and can achieve a brilliance as great as that which the modern painter can attain.