s "Butterfly" music By permission of Ricordi & Co.

[figure: a musical score excerpt]

Meiodies from Mr. Furst's "Butterfly" music By permission of Mr. David
Belasco.

CHAPTER XIII

"DER ROSENKAVALIER"

In the beginning there was "Guntram," of which we in America heard only
fragmentary echoes in our concert-rooms. Then came "Feuersnot," which
reached us in the same way, but between which and the subject which is
to occupy me in this chapter there is a kinship through a single
instrumental number, the meaning of which no commentator has dared more
than hint at. It is the music which accompanies the episode, politely
termed a "love scene," which occurs at the climax of the earlier opera,
but is supposed to take place before the opening of the curtain in the
later. Perhaps I shall recur to them again--if I have the courage.

These were the operas of Richard Strauss which no manager deemed it
necessary or advisable to produce in New York. Now came "Salome."
Popular neurasthenia was growing. Oscar Wilde thought France might
accept a glorification of necrophilism and wrote his delectable book in
French. France would have none of it, but when it was done into German,
and Richard Strauss accentuated its sexual perversity by his hysterical
music, lo! Berlin accepted it with avidity. The theatres of the
Prussian capital were keeping pace with the pathological spirit of the
day, and were far ahead of those of Paris, where, it had long been the
habit to think, moral obliquity made its residence. If Berlin, then why
not New York? So thought Mr. Conned, saturated with German
theatricalism, and seeing no likely difference in the appeal of a
"Parsifal" which he had successfully produced, and a "Salome," he
prepared to put the works of Wagner and Strauss on the same footing at
the Metropolitan Opera House. An influence which has not yet been
clearly defined, but which did not spring from the director of the
opera nor the gentlemen who were his financial backers, silenced the
maunderings of the lust-crazed Herod and paralyzed the contortions of
the lascivious dancer to whom he was willing to give one-half his
kingdom. [Footnote: For the story of "Salome" in New York, see my
"Chapters of Opera" (Henry Holt & Co., New York), p. 343 et seq.]

Now Mr. Hammerstein came to continue the artistic education which the
owners of the Metropolitan Opera House had so strangely and
unaccountably checked. Salome lived out her mad life in