Victor Hugo was characterized by Matthew Arnold as "half genius, half charlatan." Other writers have bluntly maintained that no genius, however great, can get along in this world unless he has in his make-up a trace of the charlatan. More than a trace may undoubtedly be found in Richard Strauss, who, for more than a quarter of a century, has been the most prominent composer in the world. While thousands have lauded him to the skies as a towering genius and a reformer who has created a new era in music, other thousands have allowed him little more than technical cleverness and denounced him as one who is leading music into miasmatic quagmires of cacophony and perplexing contrapuntal complications. Nay, he himself is sinking in this quagmire, we are told. "His phenomenal technic is his worst enemy." Professor Hugo Riemann, the eminent historian and lexicographer, declares that Strauss's "last works have more and more estranged his friends. Only too clearly these works reveal his determination hostile to all serious art to make a sensation at all costs. More and more does his fame appear as a Colossus with feet of clay." On the other hand, the eminent French author, Romain Rolland, maintains that "with all his faults, which are enormous, Strauss is unique, because of his great verve, his unceasing spontaneity, his privilege of remaining young in the midst of German art which is aging; and his science and art increase every day." Strauss is "one of those without whom we can no longer imagine our spiritual life," says Richard Specht, the eminent German critic. His "versatility is so great that each of his successive works shows him in a new light"; and "his technic is steadily becoming more complicated yet at the same time clearer, freer, more transparent." In his songs as in his orchestral works he voices the spirit of the time. Concerning his grandiose, revolutionary songs of the labouring man and stone breaker (Arbeitsmann and Steinklopfer), this critic declares that "one fancies, on hearing these grim, defiant sounds of wretchedness and want, that a horde of labouring men comes marching along singing a Marseillaise of to-morrow."

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