tress. In Salome she was wonderful, singing out of
tune as she often did. Her pose was hieratic as a sphinx when she
watched the antics of the neurasthenic Herod. And her dance was one of
the best I have yet seen, though Aino Acte's is said to rank them all.
Wittich, Krull, Destinn, Rose, Walther, Acte, not one of them ever
sang as sang Olive Fremstad at that memorable dress rehearsal of a
certain Sunday morning in the Metropolitan Opera-House. Vocally she
was the Salome of Richard Strauss, and she was lovely to behold.
Salome herself should be a slight, cynical young person--half
Flaubert, half Laforgue. Under Strauss the Salome is neither
impossible nor vulgar. Very intense, an apparition rather than a
human, she sounds the violet rays of eroticism (if I may be forgiven
such a confusion of terms, of such a mixed metaphor). Another thing:
the tempi were different from Campanini's--_i. e._, the plastic
quality of the reading gave us new colours, new scents, new curves.
Strauss is careless when he directs the works of others, but with his
own he is all devotion. Take Elektra, for instance.

But I must finish my Salome budget. The Herod was not the actor that
was Karl Burrian, but he sang better. His name is Josef Tyssen. The
John was Herman Weil. Salome was preceded by Feuersnot, the folks-tone
of which is an admirable foil to the overladen tints of Salome. (By
the way, the sky in the latter opera showed the dipper constellation,
Charles's Wain. Now, will some astronomer tell us if such a thing is
possible in Syrian skies?) Herman Weil was the chief point of
attraction. As for the so-called immoral ending of the composition,
discovered by amateur critical prudes, to be forthright in my speech,
it is all nonsense: it doesn't exist. But Wolzogen doesn't follow the
lines of the Famine of Fire. His is a love scene with a joke for
relief. The music is ultra-Wagnerian, the finale genuine Strauss, with
its swelling melos, its almost superhuman forcing of the emotional
line to the ecstatic point.

In Elektra, with the composer conducting, I again marvelled at the
noisy, ineffective "reading" of a Hammerstein conductor, whose name
I've forgotten. Yet New York has seen the best of Elektras, Mme.
Mazarin--would that she had sung and danced here in Stuttgart! She
might have surprised the composer--but New York is yet to hear Elektra
as music-drama. Thus far I think (and it's only one man's opinion)
that Strauss will endure because