d a famous passage in
"Jean-Christophe" (I quote from the translation of Gilbert Cannon):
"Agamemnon was neurasthenic and Achilles impotent; they lamented their
condition at length and, naturally, their outcries produced no change.
The energy of the drama was concentrated in the role of Iphigenia--a
nervous, hysterical, and pedantic Iphigenia, who lectured the hero,
declaimed furiously, laid bare for the audience her Nietzschian
pessimism and, glutted with death, cut her throat, shrieking with
laughter."

But will _Elektra_ have the same effect on future audiences? I do not
think so. Its terror has, in a measure, been dissipated. Schoenberg,
Strawinsky, and Ornstein have employed its discords--and many newer
ones--for pleasanter purposes, and our ears are becoming accustomed to
these assaults on the casual harmony of our forefathers. _Elektra_ will
retain its place as a forerunner, and inevitably it will eventually be
considered the most important of Strauss's operatic works, but it can
never be listened to again in that same spirit of horror and repentance,
with that feeling of utter repugnance, which it found easy to awaken in
1910. Perhaps all of us were a little better for the experience.

An attendant at the opening ceremonies in New York can scarcely forget
them. Cast under the spell by the early entrance of Elektra, wild-eyed
and menacing, across the terrace of the courtyard of Agamemnon's palace,
he must have remained with staring eyes and wide-flung ears, straining
for the remainder of the evening to catch the message of this tale of
triumphant and utterly holy revenge. The key of von Hofmannsthal's fine
play was lost to some reviewers, as it was to Romain Rolland in the
passage quoted above, who only saw in the drama a perversion of the
Greek idea of Nemesis. That there was something very much finer in the
theme, it was left for Bernard Shaw to discover. To him _Elektra_
expressed the regeneration of a race, the destruction of vice,
ignorance, and poverty. The play was replete in his mind with
sociological and political implications, and, as his views in the matter
exactly coincide with my own, I cannot do better than to quote a few
lines from them, including, as they do, his interesting prophecies
regarding the possibility of war between England and Germany,
unfortunately unfulfilled. Strauss could not quite prevent the war with
his _Elektra_. Here is the passage:

"What Hofmannsthal and Strauss have done