He was not
a professional musician, but he had a thoroughly musical nature. The
laws of composition he had studied theoretically, and he followed them
practically. His position, in reality, was that of a professor of
mathematics. But music was his secret love. He not only knew the great
masters, but he lived in them. He thought little of playing on the
piano the whole of one of Mozart's operas, note for note, without any
written music before him. I have often seen him do this. How much I
have owed to those hours! How he could draw his hearers into the right
mood! How he could illuminate the groping mind with the lightning
flash of thought!"
To this friend Strauss sent from Munich in 1851 ten sonnets. They were
accompanied by a versified dedication to Kauffmann himself, and they
constitute his claim to be considered a poet as well as a philosophic
theologian. The sonnets are all on musical subjects, and may be taken
as the natural outgrowth of that cultivation of his musical taste
which he owed to his intimate association with Professor Kauffmann.
The metrical dedication and the first five sonnets are given in the
sketch before referred to. The writer of that article looks upon the
tendency, thus displayed by Strauss, to "drop into poetry," as Mr.
Wegg was accustomed to say, as another strong proof of the
affinity--elsewhere noticed--between the genius of Strauss and that of
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing; who, it will be remembered, sometimes
diverted himself with the composition of light poetical pieces, such
as his famous song, beginning "Gestern, Brueder, koennt ihr's glauben?"
The first sonnet is on Haendel, the second on Glueck, the third on
Haydn, the fourth on _Don Juan_, and the fifth on _Figaro_.
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