e revulsion from a pitiless
sensuality that the poet had intended to procure through this
representation. But Strauss's music, save in such exceptional passages
as the shimmering, restless, nerve-sick opening page, or the beginning
of the scene with the head, or certain other crimson patches, hampers
and even negates the intended effect. It emasculates the drama with its
pervasive prettiness, its lazy felicitousness where it ought to be
monstrous and terrifying, its reminiscences of Mendelssohn, Tchaikowsky
and "Little Egypt." The lascivious and hieratic dance, the dance of the
seven veils, is represented by a _valse lente_. Oftentimes the score
verges perilously on circus-music, recalls the sideshows at county
fairs. No doubt, in so doing it weakens the odor exuded by Wilde's play.
But if we must have an operatic "Salome," it is but reasonable to demand
that the composer in his music express the sexual cruelty and frenzy
symbolized in the figure of the dancer. And the Salome of Strauss's
score is as little the Salome of Wilde as she is the Salome of Flaubert
or Beardsley or Moreau or Huysmans. One cannot help feeling her
eminently a buxom, opulent Berliner, the wife, say, of the proprietor of
a large department store; a heavy lady a good deal less "daemonisch" and
"perverse" than she would like to have it appear. But there are moments
when one feels as though Strauss's heroine were not even a Berliner, or
of the upper middle class. There are moments when she is plainly Kaethi,
the waitress at the Muenchner Hofbrauehaus. And though she declares to
Jokanaan that "it is his mouth of which she is enamored," she delivers
the words in her own true-hearted, unaffected brogue.

Nor is "Elektra," more sharp than "Salome," though it oftentimes is, the
musical equivalent for the massive and violent forms of archaic Greek
sculpture that Strauss intended it be. Elektra herself is perhaps more
truly incarnate fury than Salome is incarnate luxury; ugliness and
demoniacal brooding, madness and cruelty are here more sheerly
powerfully expressed than in the earlier score; the scene of
recognition between brother and sister is more large and touching than
anything in "Salome"; Elektra's paean and dance, for all its closeness
to a banal _cantilena_, its _tempo di valse_ so characteristic of the
later Strauss, is perhaps more grandiosely and balefully triumphant than
the dancer's scene with the head. Nevertheless, the work is by no means
r