What a composer writes after his sixtieth year is not expected to break new ground. Indeed even at fifty, and earlier, so enterprising a lover of curiosities as Ravel had become spun into set mannerisms, and from a much earlier age Strauss never wrote anything essentially new. What one does properly look for in an artist who has reached mature mastery—as he must have done long before sixty if he was built that way at all—is not novelty, but consistency. One asks whether such a man has been true to himself or whether he has merely followed a series of fashions and dropped out of them again one by one.