wearies the mind and makes the listener long for a change to a
fresher and healthier musical atmosphere.

CHAPTER VI

"HERODIADE"

In the ballet scene of Gounod's most popular opera Mephistopheles
conjures up visions of Phryne, Lais, Aspasia, Cleopatra, and Helen of
Troy to beguile the jaded interest of Faust. The list reads almost like
a catalogue of the operas of Massenet whose fine talent was largely
given to the celebration of the famous courtesans of the ancient world.
With the addition of a few more names from the roster of antiquity
(Thais, Dalila, and Aphrodite), and some less ancient but no less
immoral creatures of modern fancy, like Violetta, Manon Lescaut, Zaza,
and Louise, we might make a pretty complete list of representatives of
the female type in which modern dramatists and composers seem to think
the interest of humanity centres.

When Massenet's "Herodiade" was announced as the first opera to be
given at the Manhattan Opera House in New York for the season of
1909-1910 it looked to some observers as if the dominant note of the
year was to be sounded by the Scarlet Woman; but the representation
brought a revelation and a surprise. The names of the principal
characters were those which for a few years had been filling the lyric
theatres of Germany with a moral stench; but their bearers in
Massenet's opera did little or nothing that was especially shocking to
good taste or proper morals. Herod was a love-sick man of lust, who
gazed with longing eyes upon the physical charms of Salome and pleaded
for her smiles like any sentimental milksop; but he did not offer her
Capernaum for a dance. Salome may have known how, but she did not dance
for either half a kingdom or the whole of a man's head. Instead, though
there were intimations that her reputation was not all that a good
maiden's ought to be, she sang pious hosannahs and waved a palm branch
conspicuously in honor of the prophet at whose head she had bowled
herself in the desert, the public streets, and king's palaces. At the
end she killed herself when she found that the vengeful passion of
Herodias and the jealous hatred of Herod had compassed the death of the
saintly man whom she had loved. Herodias was a wicked woman, no doubt,
for John the Baptist denounced her publicly as a Jezebel, but her
jealousy of Salome had reached a point beyond her control before she
learned that her rival was her own daughter whom she had deserted for
love of t