Edward E. Ziegler discerns that Richard Strauss is “a master of music mathematics and one who is composing music for the present. It is an easy evasion,” he adds, “to shift the responsibility for what the living generation cannot easily or will not willingly grasp and to proclaim that such intricate writing is for the future. But music has ever reflected life, and no other composer has so nearly approached a musical expression of our time as has Strauss. The febrile unrest, the neurotic striving of the hour, all have their musical equivalent in his greater compositions. Plying the stress of emphasis as Strauss does is characteristic of the present as is typical his use of the enormous orchestra. All life has become agitated by the exaggeration of the hour. It needed but a master like Strauss to express this truth in music.” August Spanuth holds that “Richard Strauss may be a monstrous phenomenon, yet he embodies the domineering spirit of modern music. For more than two centuries composers have endeavored to vindicate the cause of programme-music, which the staunch old champions of ‘absolute music’ have fought from the outset. However, after the efforts of Berlioz and Liszt, Richard Strauss has succeeded in reversing the question, making it read thus: Is there a future left for instrumental music outside of the descriptive, pictorial, illustrative, suggestive, and philosophizing music of to-day?” Ernest Newman, in a masterly article, concludes with this telling passage:— ... This kind of music adds to our knowledge of man and the world as much as does a play of Ibsen or a novel of Tolstoy. Certainly to any one who knows Strauss’s music to Don Quixote, the story of Cervantes is henceforth inconceivable without it; the story itself, indeed, has not one tithe of the humor and the profound sadness which is infused into it by Strauss. What he has done in this work is to inaugurate the period of the novel in music. And here at last we see the subtle fitness of things that has deprived Strauss of those purely lyrical qualities, whose absence, as I have previously argued, makes it impossible for him to be an absolute creator of shapes of pure self-sustained beauty. His type of melody is now seen to be, not a failing, but a magnificent gift. It is the prose of music—a grave, flexible, eloquent prose. His style is nervous, compact, sinuous, as good prose should be, which, as it is related, through its subject-matter, more responsibly to life than is poetry, must relinquish some of the fine abandonment of song, and find its compensation in a perfect blend, a perfect compromise of logic and rapture, truth and ideality. “I can conceive,” says Flaubert, in one of his letters, “a style which should be beautiful; which some one will write one of these days, in ten years or in ten centuries; which shall be rhythmical as verse, precise as the language of science, and with undulations,