Programme music – and Strauss’s in particular – continued to be controversial. A Strauss Festival was due to take place in London in 1903, and some critics prepared the ground for it. Newman regarded Strauss as the greatest living musician. Shedlock, however, still had serious reservations and felt it wise to withhold judgement. Nevertheless he expressed his distaste for Don Juan, with its ‘ridiculous realism’ and the ‘painfully ugly polyphony of many pages of the score’. He thought the work broke the bounds of art; it might be acceptable as a joke – Strauss showing the absurdity of realism – but the passages of undoubted beauty in the work showed that this had not been the composer’s intention. For the Academy critic, Strauss was undoubtedly the most notable contemporary composer, but he provoked reactions that were not only diverse but fluid: the opinion of a friend, an esteemed critic, about Also sprach Zarathustra had swung from one extreme to another within the space of a few months. A year later, he himself was still undecided: Strauss he declared ‘an unsolved problem’. He accepted that Tod und Verklärung was ‘great music’, but difficult to understand without the programme. Therefore either the programme was too complex to be conveyed by music, or else Strauss was a pioneer, who was showing that music could express things hitherto thought impossible. ‘At any rate he is in earnest, he is interesting, he has power, and we must wait and listen and suspend judgement.’

Critics still worried about realism, an issue complicated by the realistic effects in accepted masterpieces – Mendelssohn’s braying donkey in A Midsummer Night’s

Dream and Beethoven’s cuckoo in the Sixth Symphony. The issue came to a head with Strauss’s Symphonia Domestica. Here even Newman parted company with Strauss. He was hugely disappointed and thought the attempt in the programme notes to present a very ordinary day in family life as a philosophical meditation was ludicrous. His verdict was uncompromising: ‘it is time the world protested against so much of its leisure and its funds being taken up with sheer inanities of this kind’. Newman thought Strauss’s frequent episodes of freakishness were evidence that his artistic sense was in decline: his themes were becoming more fragmentary, his orchestration was overblown, and he treated his themes in ways that destroyed their effect: ‘The Symphonia Domestica I take to be the work of an enormously clever man who was once a genius.’