the title alone, whether he could read the music or not.
Strauss whistled it, and to prove his bona fides added, “It’s in
the key of B flat.”
The examiner went over to the green-painted upright piano
and hit one greasy black key. The instrument was horribly
out of tunethe note was much nearer to the standard
440/cps A than it was to B flatbut the examiner said, “So
it is. Alfie, write down, ‘Also read flats.’ All right, son, you’re
a member. Nice to have you with us; not many people can
read that old-style notation any more. A lot of them think
they’re too good for it.”
“Thank you,” Strauss said.
“My feeling is, if it was good enough for the old masters,
it’s good enough for us. We don’t have people like them
with us these days, it seems to me. Except for Dr. Krafft, of
course. They were great back in the old daysmen like
Shilkrit, Steiner, Tiomkin, and Pearl . . . and Wilder and
Jannsen. Real goffin.”
“Dock gewiss,” Strauss said politely.
But the work went forward. He was making a little income
now, from small works. People seemed to feel a special
interest in a composer who had come out of the -mind sculp-
tors’ laboratories; and in addition the material itself, Strauss
was quite certain, had merits of its own to help sell it.
It was the opera which counted, however. That grew and
grew under his pen, as fresh and new as his new life, as
founded in knowledge and ripeness as his long full memory.
Finding a libretto had been troublesome at first. While it
was possible that something existed that might have served