Richard Strauss, who twenty-five years ago was the most interesting star in the musical firmament, has lived long enough to have outlived a part of his popularity. He never originated a musical form, but accepted the symphonic poem of Liszt and the music-drama of Wagner as models. His workmanship is infinitely greater than Liszt’s, his counterpoint stupendous in its boldness, and in his treatment of the orchestra he sometimes transcends even Wagner in the originality of his orchestral combinations. But his compositions lack the ideality of either of these masters, and because of this and in spite of his marvellous paraphernalia, his works seem to carry within them the seeds of their own decay. The gods endowed this man at his birth perhaps more richly than any other musician of our time, but something within him has made him relinquish the greatest of their gifts and has turned him to less pure ideals. In the “Sinfonia Domestica” the daily life of husband, wife, and baby are characterized by an orchestra of one hundred and ten players with such noisy fury and realistic prose as to give one an altogether distorted insight into what is supposedly a page from the composer’s diary. But the music descriptive of the composer who, after these dreadful domestic squabbles, retires to his workroom, lights his lamp, and begins to communicate with his muse, is so beautiful as to fill us with a deep regret that one so winged for flight in the ether should be so content to walk on the earth. The instrumental devices, depicting _Don Quixote’s_ adventure with the sheep and his fight with the windmill, which aroused such astonishment and admiration when they were first heard, have already lost their effect and are listened to to-day with hardly a smile. The final scene, however, depicting the dying of _Don Quixote_, is so beautiful and tragic in its expression as to bring tears to the listener. The “Heldenleben” is to me a work of noisy bombastic emptiness from beginning to end, and one might call it typical of certain German currents of to-day. It would, however, be manifestly unfair to call it typically German, as a race that has produced Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner will surely find other men to continue their glorious traditions. A composer’s fame is not affirmed by professional musicians but by the general public whose judgment in the end is infallible. A great masterwork that is not destroyed will always eventually be recognized as such whether, like the “Venus de Milo,” it has lain hidden for centuries beneath the earth or, like the “Matthew Passion” of Bach, equally hidden in the dusty shelves of the Royal Library of Berlin, to be rediscovered by Mendelssohn and pronounced the greatest religious choral work ever written.