Like Michelangelo’s Victory, it has set its knee on the captive’s back, and seems ready to despatch him.  But suddenly it stops, hesitates, and looks about with uncertain eyes, and its expression is one of languid disgust, as though weariness had seized it.

And this is how the work of Richard Strauss appears to me up to the present.  Guntram kills Duke Robert, and immediately lets fall his sword.  The frenzied laugh of Zarathustra ends in an avowal of discouraged impotence.  The delirious passion of Don Juan dies away in nothingness.  Don Quixote when dying forswears his illusions.  Even the Hero himself admits the futility of his work, and seeks oblivion in an indifferent Nature.  Nietzsche, speaking of the artists of our time, laughs at “those Tantaluses of the will, rebels and enemies of laws, who come, broken in spirit, and fall at the foot of the cross of Christ.”  Whether it is for the sake of the Cross or Nothingness, these heroes renounce their victories in disgust and despair, or with a resignation that is sadder still.  It was not thus that Beethoven overcame his sorrows.  Sad adagios make their lament in the middle of his symphonies, but a note of joy and triumph is always sounded at the end.  His work is the triumph of a conquered hero; that of Strauss is the defeat of a conquering hero.  This irresoluteness of the will can be still more clearly seen in contemporary German literature, and in particular in the author of Die versunkene Glocke.  But it is more striking in Strauss, because he is more heroic.  And so we get all this display of superhuman will, and the end is only “My desire is gone!”

In this lies the undying worm of German thought—­I am speaking of the thought of the choice few who enlighten the present and anticipate the future.  I see an heroic people, intoxicated by its triumphs, by its great riches, by its numbers, by its force, which clasps the world in its great arms and subjugates it, and then stops, fatigued by its conquest, and asks:  “Why have I conquered?”

HUGO WOLF

The more one learns of the history of great artists, the more one is struck by the immense amount of sadness their lives enclose.  Not only are they subjected to the trials and disappointments of ordinary life—­which affect them more cruelly through their greater sensitiveness—­but their surroundings are like a desert, because they are twenty, thirty, fifty, or even hundreds of years in advance of their contemporaries; and they are often condemned to despairing efforts, not to conquer the world, but to live.