Heldenleben would be in every way one of the masterpieces of musical composition if a literary error had not suddenly cut short the soaring flight of its most impassioned pages, at the supreme point of interest in the movement, in order to follow the programme; though, besides this, a certain coldness, perhaps weariness, creeps in towards the end.  The victorious hero perceives that he has conquered in vain:  the baseness and stupidity of men have remained unaltered.  He stifles his anger, and scornfully accepts the situation.  Then he seeks refuge in the peace of Nature.  The creative force within him flows out in imaginative works; and here Richard Strauss, with a daring warranted only by his genius, represents these works by reminiscences of his own compositions, and Don Juan, Macbeth, Tod und Verklaerung, Till, Zarathustra, Don Quixote, Guntram, and even his Lieder, associate themselves with the hero whose story he is telling.  At times a storm will remind this hero of his combats; but he also remembers his moments of love and happiness, and his soul is quieted.  Then the music unfolds itself serenely, and rises with calm strength to the closing chord of triumph, which is placed like a crown of glory on the hero’s head.

There is no doubt that Beethoven’s ideas have often inspired, stimulated, and guided Strauss’s own ideas.  One feels an indescribable reflection of the first Heroic and of the Ode to Joy in the key of the first part (E flat); and the last part recalls, even more forcibly, certain of Beethoven’s Lieder.  But the heroes of the two composers are very different:  Beethoven’s hero is more classical and more rebellious; and Strauss’s hero is more concerned with the exterior world and his enemies, his conquests are achieved with greater difficulty, and his triumph is wilder in consequence.  If that good Oulibicheff pretends to see the burning of Moscow in a discord in the first Heroic, what would he find here?  What scenes of burning towns, what battlefields!  Besides that there is cutting scorn and a mischievous laughter in Heldenleben that is never heard in Beethoven.  There is, in fact, little kindness in Strauss’s work; it is the work of a disdainful hero.

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In considering Strauss’s music as a whole, one is at first struck by the diversity of his style.  The North and the South mingle; and in his melodies one feels the attraction of the sun.  Something Italian had crept into Tristan; but how much more of Italy there is in the work of this disciple of Nietzsche.  The phrases are often Italian and their harmonies ultra-Germanic.  Perhaps one of the greatest charms of Strauss’s art is that we are able to watch the rent in the dark clouds of German polyphony, and see shining through it the smiling line of an Italian coast and the gay dancers on its shore.  This is not merely a vague analogy.  It would be easy, if idle, to notice unmistakable reminiscences of France and Italy even in Strauss’s most advanced works, such as Zarathustra and Heldenleben.  Mendelssohn, Gounod, Wagner, Rossini, and Mascagni elbow one another strangely.  But these disparate elements have a softer outline when the work is taken as a whole, for they have been absorbed and controlled by the composer’s imagination.