is to take Klytaemnestra and
AEgisthus, and by identifying them with everything evil and cruel, with
all that needs must hate the highest when it sees it, with hideous
domination and coercion of the higher by the baser, with the murderous
rage in which the lust for a lifetime of orgiastic pleasure turns on its
slaves in the torture of its disappointment, and the sleepless horror
and misery of its neurasthenia, to so rouse in us an overwhelming flood
of wrath against it and a ruthless resolution to destroy it that
Elektra's vengeance becomes holy to us, and we come to understand how
even the gentlest of us could wield the ax of Orestes or twist our firm
fingers in the black hair of Klytaemnestra to drag back her head and
leave her throat open to the stroke.

"This was a task hardly possible to an ancient Greek, and not easy even
for us, who are face to face with the America of the Thaw case and the
European plutocracy of which that case was only a trifling symptom, and
that is the task that Hofmannsthal and Strauss have achieved. Not even
in the third scene of _Das Rheingold_ or in the Klingsor scene in
_Parsifal_ is there such an atmosphere of malignant, cancerous evil as
we get here and that the power with which it is done is not the power of
the evil itself, but of the passion that detests and must and finally
can destroy that evil is what makes the work great and makes us rejoice
in its horror.

"Whoever understands this, however vaguely, will understand Strauss's
music. I have often said, when asked to state the case against the fools
and the money changers who are trying to drive us into a war with
Germany, that the case consists of the single word 'Beethoven.' To-day I
should say with equal confidence 'Strauss.' In this music drama Strauss
has done for us with utterly satisfying force what all the noblest
powers of life within us are clamouring to have said in protest against
and defiance of the omnipresent villainies of our civilization, and this
is the highest achievement of the highest art."

Mme. Mazarin was the torch-bearer in New York of this magnificent
creation. She is, indeed, the only singer who has ever appeared in the
role in America, and I have never heard _Elektra_ in Europe. However,
those who have seen other interpreters of the role assure me that Mme.
Mazarin so far outdistanced them as to make comparison impossible. This,
in spite of the fact that _Elektra_ in French necessarily lost something