His capacity for forceful utterance is remarkable.

Only in certain pages of Strauss is there anything in contemporary music which compares, for superb virility, dynamic power, and sweep of line, with the opening of the "Keltic" sonata.

He has, moreover, a remarkable gift for compact expression.
Time and again he astonishes by his ability to charge a composition of the briefest span with an emotional or dramatic content of large and far-reaching significance.

His "To the Sea,"[10] for example, is but thirty-one bars long; yet within this limited frame he has confined a tone-picture which for breadth of conception and concentrated splendour of effect is paralleled in the contemporary literature of the piano only by himself.

Consider, also, the "Epilogue" in the revised version of the "Marionettes." The piece comprises only a score of measures; yet within it the thought of the composer traverses a world of philosophical meditation: here is reflected the mood of one who looks with grave tenderness across the tragi-comedy of human life, in which, he would say to us, we are no less the playthings of a controlling destiny than are the figures of his puppet microcosm.
[9] The revised version, published in 1901, is referred to.