He is every sort of tradesman, from tailor to doctor.  Many of the stories, perhaps the best, are not stories at all, but merely clever sayings.  In most of the tricks there is a Roland for an Oliver.  Till stops at no estate; parsons are his favorite victims.  He is, on the whole, in favor with the people, though he played havoc with entire villages.  Once he was condemned to death by the Luebeck council.  But even here it was his enemies, whom he had defrauded, that sought revenge.  The others excused the tricks and applauded his escape.  Even in death the scandal and mischief do not cease.

The directions in Strauss’ music are new in their kind and dignity.  They belong quite specially to this new vein of tonal painting.  In a double function, they not merely guide the player, but the listener as well.  The humor is of utmost essence; the humor is the thing, not the play, nor the story of each of the pranks, in turn, of our jolly rogue.  And the humor lies much in these words of the composer, that give the lilt of motion and betray a sense of the intended meaning.

[Music:  Gemaechlich]

The tune, sung at the outset gemaechlich (comfortably), is presumably the rogue motif, first in pure innocence of mood.  But quickly comes another, quite opposed in rhythm, that soon hurries into highest speed.  These are not the “subjects” of old tradition.

[Music:  (Horn)]

And first we are almost inclined to take the “Rondo form” as a new roguish prank.  But we may find a form where the subjects are independent of the basic themes that weave in and out unfettered by rule—­where the subjects are rather new grouping of the fundamental symbols.[A]

[Footnote A:  It is like the Finale of Brahms’ Fourth Symphony, where an older form (of passacaglia) is reared together with a later, one within the other.]

After a pause in the furious course of the second theme, a quick piping phrase sounds lustig (merrily) in the clarinet, answered by a chord of ominous

[Music:  Molto allegro (Clar.) lustig]

token.  But slowly do we trace the laughing phrase to the first theme.

And here is a new whim.  Though still in full tilt, the touch of demon is gone in a kind of ursine clog of the basses.  Merely jaunty and clownish it would be but for the mischievous scream (of high flute) at the end.  And now begins a rage of pranks, where the main phrase is the rogue’s laugh, rising in brilliant gamut of outer pitch and inner mood.

At times the humor is in the spirit of a Jean Paul, playing between rough fun and sadness in a fine spectrum of moods.  The lighter motive dances harmlessly about the more serious, intimate second phrase.  There is almost the sense of lullaby before the sudden plunge to wildest chaos, the only portent being a constant trembling of low strings.  All Bedlam is let loose, where the rogue’s shriek is heard through a confused cackling and a medley of voices here and there on the running phrase (that ever ends the second theme).  The sound of a big rattle is added to the scene,—­where perhaps the whole village is in an uproar over some wholesale trick of the rogue.