of his Till Eulenspiegel, Don
Quixote, and Elektra. The mists are gathering over the other works;
Salome is too theatrical, Feuersnot a pasticcio of Wagner, Guntram is
out of the question (for ten years I've used it to sit on when I
played Bach's C-major invention), and even the mighty major-minor
opening of Also Sprach Zarathustra begins to pall. But not Don
Quixote, so full of irony, humour, and pathos; not Elektra, in the
strictest sense of the word a melodrama, and certainly not the
prankish and ever inimitable Till Eulenspiegel. These abide by one,
whereas the head in Salome has become vieux chapeau. When Ellmenreich
sang to it that night it might have been a succulent boar's head on a
platter for all the audience cared. (I fancy they would have preferred
the boar to the saint--deadliest of all operatic bores, for ever
intoning a variant of the opening bars of the Fidelio overture.)

But the Stuttgart Elektra performance will live long in my memory, but
not because of the lady who assumed the title role, Idenka Fassbender,
of Munich. (She is not to be compared with the epileptic Mazarin for a
moment. She is not Elektra vocally or histrionically.) The artiste of
the evening was Anna von Mildenburg (Vienna), the wife of Herman
Bahr, novelist and playwright, best known to America as the author of
The Concert, one of David Belasco's productions. The Mildenburg is a
giantess, with a voice like an organ. She is also an uneven singer,
being hugely temperamental. The night in question she was keyed up to
the occasion, and for the first time I realised the impressiveness of
the part of Klytemnestra, its horrid tragic force, its abnormal
intensity, its absolute revelation of the abomination of desolation.
Mildenburg played it as a mixture of Lady Macbeth and Queen Gertrude,
Hamlet's mother. And when she sang fortissimo all the Strauss horses
and all the Strauss men were as supine, tonally speaking, as Humpty
Dumpty. Her voice is of a sultry tonal splendour.

The two new opera-houses--also theatres--are set in a park, as should
be art and opera houses. Facing the lake is the larger, a building of
noble appearance, with a capacity for 1,400 persons seated. The
smaller building only holds 800, but it looks as big as the old New
York Sub-Treasury, and is twice as severe. Max Reinhardt calls the
Hof-Oper the most beautiful in Europe. He is not exaggerating. A round
7,000,000 marks (about $1,750,000) was the cost of the building