Overtones, a book of temperaments: Richard Strauss, Parsifal, Verdi, Balzac

It is easier to trace the artistic lineage of Richard Strauss to its fountain-head—Johann Sebastian Bach—than to stamp with a contemporary stencil its curious ramifications. And this is not alone because of a similar polyphonic complexity, a complex of themes and their development without parallel since the days of the pattern-weaving Flemish contrapuntists; but because, like Bach Strauss has experimented in the disassociation of harmonies, and, in company with his contemporary, the master-...