Richard Strauss is generally regarded as the great continuer of the German song tradition. That he is a true continuer is perfectly correct. Whether his music, absolutely considered, is as ‘great’ as people once thought is still undecided by the public. Some profess to discover liberal injections of the charlatan in Strauss’s work. Whether he sometimes gets his effects by cheap means which the artist in him would despise is a question to be argued elsewhere. We must, however, grant him two great faculties--the faculty of beautiful melody and that of musical ability. In sheer beauty of theme (and this is especially true in some of his songs) he is worthy to be regarded as of the line of Schubert and Brahms. In musical learning there are probably not half a dozen men in the world to-day to equal him and there was a time, ten or more years ago, when he seemed to stand almost alone. While for some years past his symphonic poems and operas have overshadowed his smaller work, he has been known from the beginning as a brilliant writer of songs, and has not ceased to give some of his best energies to song composition. The result is a truly brilliant list of lyrics. We can no more deny the able musicianship of the later ones than we can deny the impressive beauty of the earlier. They are far from being repetitions of each other. This great variety, both in mood and in technical style, proves what a rich fund of ideas and artistic power the composer had to draw from. The technique of the later ones is about that familiar to us in the Strauss operas, a brilliant use of dissonance and rapid modulation combined with an extremely bold polyphony. At the basis of this style is always a theme or a group of themes as simple, as conventional in conception as anything in Schubert. It is as though Strauss were afraid of losing utterly the interest of the average man and gave him every now and then a simple tune that he would be sure to enjoy. But it is more than this. For Strauss is a German of the Germans. His whole musical culture is truly built on the great German tradition of Bach-Beethoven-Brahms. His complexity is only a development of the noble simplicity of all fine German music. It is right and proper that his themes should be simple and understandable. But it is possible, and probably perfectly just, to argue that he has failed to make the one part of his music seem a development of the other. We feel here that the new style and the old are both present, that they are juxtaposed, that they have not been fused or synthesized. And this duality, which we feel in some of the operas and in the later orchestral works, also appears in his songs. It makes these later songs less admirable, from the technical standpoint, than those of Ravel, who has organized his materials into an almost homogeneous technique.