Death and Apotheosis is a tone-poem, rather Lisztian in its pompous and processional picture at the close. Its very title calls up the Weimar master’s Tasso. But it differs inasmuch as it is better realized externally, while its psychology, morbid in several episodes, is more masterful. It is not a Tasso, not a poet enthroned in deathless immortality, but a soul, _the_ soul, which, lying in its “necessitous little chamber” of death, reviews its past, its youth, hope, love, conflict, defeat, despair, and at the end its feverish ecstasy, its sorrowful dissolution. Strauss with a secret tiny brush has surprised the human heart in travail. It is pathos breeding. The added touches of realism, the gasping for breath, and the lenten _tic-toc_ of the heart, should not disquiet us. Æsthetic propriety is never violated. And Tod und Verklärung is hardly the greatest that is in Richard Strauss. The much-discussed Thus spake Zarathustra is not, as has been humorously asserted, an attempt to make music a camel that will bear the burdens of philosophy; it is the outcome of profound study in the vaticinating leaves of Nietzsche’s bible. Its dancing lyricism is reflected in the Strauss score, which opens with a pantheistic evocation of sunrise, uplifting in its elemental grandeur. Seldom has music displayed a result brought about with such comparative simplicity—a simplicity in inverse proportion to its subtlety. It invites to the prayer of the sun worshippers as they salute their round burning god lifting in the blue. The composition is welded by a giant will. It contains so many incongruous elements, that their complete amalgamation seems at first hearing an incredible attempt. It is the old symphonic-poem form of Liszt, but altered, amplified. The themes appear, disappear, surge to insanity in their passion, melt into religious appeal, dance with bacchanalian joy, mock, blaspheme, exhort, and enchant. There is ugly music and hieratic, music bitter and sweet, black music and white, music that repels and music that lures—we are hopelessly snared by the dream tunes of this enharmonic fowler, who often pipes in No Man’s Land on the other side of good and evil. The ear is ravished, the eye dazzled; every brain centre is assaulted, yet responds to a new and formidable engine for stimulating ideas and emotions. The Old-World riddle is propounded and left unsolved. And we seem to have grazed an Apocalypse of scepticism in the conflicting tonalities with their sphinx-like profiles. III