“Now listen to that,” said Richard Strauss to me during the third movement of Impressions d’Italie; “that is the true music of Montmartre, the utterance of fine words ...  Liberty!...  Love!... which no one believes.”

And on the whole he found the music quite charming, and, without doubt, in the depths of his heart approved of this Frenchman according to conventional notions that are current in Germany alone.  Strauss is really very fond of Charpentier, and was his patron in Berlin; and I remember how he showed childish delight in Louise when it was first performed in Paris.

But Strauss, and most other Germans, are quite on the wrong track when they try to persuade themselves that this amusing French frivolity is still the exclusive property of France.  They really love it because it has become German; and they are quite unconscious of the fact.  The German artists of other times did not find much pleasure in frivolity; but I could have easily shown Strauss his liking for it by taking examples from his own works.  The Germans of to-day have but little in common with the Germans of yesterday.

I am not speaking of the general public only, The German public of to-day are devotees of Brahms and Wagner, and everything of theirs seems good to them; they have no discrimination, and, while they applaud Wagner and encore Brahms, they are, in their hearts, not only frivolous, but sentimental and gross.  The most striking thing about this public is their cult of power since Wagner’s death.  When listening to the end of Die Meistersinger I felt how the haughty music of the great march reflected the spirit of this military nation of shop-keepers, bursting with rude health and complacent pride.

The most remarkable thing of all is that German artists are gradually losing the power of understanding their own splendid classics and, in particular, Beethoven.  Strauss, who is very shrewd and knows exactly his own limitations, does not willingly enter Beethoven’s domain, though he feels his spirit in a much more living way than any of the other German Kapellmeister.  At the Strasburg festival he contented himself with conducting, besides his own symphony, the Oberon Overture and a Mozart concerto.  These performances were interesting; a personality like his is so curious that it is quite amusing to find it coming out in the works he conducts.  But how Mozart’s features took on an offhand and impatient air; and how the rhythms were accentuated at the expense of the melodic grace.  In this case, however, Strauss was dealing with a concerto, where a certain liberty of interpretation is allowed.  But Mahler, who was less discreet, ventured upon conducting the whole of the Beethoven concert.  And what can be said of that evening?  I will not speak of the Concerto for pianoforte, in G major, which Busoni played with a brilliant and superficial execution that took away all breadth