MUSIC CHRONICLE
Elektra and Strauss at the Metropolitan
For the first time in history the directors of the Metropolitan Opera
have made a gesture toward incorporating the works of a serious and
world-renowned musician into the repertoire during his life-time.
There have been, to be sure, spasmodic and often admirable attempts at
presenting works by Strauss, Stravinsky, Ravel, de Falla, Pizetti, and
others as "novelties." Several winters ago, for instance,
Elektra
scored
a sensation in this guise, only to be unaccountably withdrawn at the
year's end. The past season, however, has seen a surprising change of
policy. Works by Richard Strauss were given more performances than
those of any composer except Wagner and Verdi. A sort of Strauss cycle
was presented, which the public received with that hushed reverence
customarily bestowed in America only upon the safely-buried masters.
A key to the understanding of Strauss, and the reason for this sudden
acceptance of music which had so long baffled the bourgeoisie, may be
detected in the order and dates of his compositions. The tone-poems,
upon which his broadest fame has always rested, were written for the
most part during the last decade of the 19th Century. The three operas
which New York has heard this winter were their successors,-Salome
(1905),
Elektra
(
1909), and the
Rosenkavalier
(
1911). With these dates
in mind, it can hardly be averred that the Metropolitan is treating its
audiences to the last word in contemporary musical expression, even
though Strauss may be still alive and still composing. News of the
current effort can be greeted only with the subdued applause that we
might bestow on the Metropolitan Museum if it were to purchase an
important Picasso of the Negro Period ( 1909) -which it will not do for
some time.
Any one can gather from the order in which his best works were
produced, and the steady tapering-off in quality after 1911, that Strauss
was rooted fast in the traditions of the last century. His stylistic develop–
ment is curious, however; for there are two forces at work in all his
early writing that would seem to be pulling in opposite directions. He has
always inordinately loved the simplicity and refinement of Mozart; while
his natural gift and inclination lay with the colorful and tempestuous
dissonances of the Wagnerian orchestra. Many of his best-established
works betray a struggle between the two; until in 1909 the second tradi–
tion was killed by
Elektra.
The colossal fabric was finished at last to
which every composer had added his cubit since the days of Papa Haydn.
Elektra
marks the end of the way; no one could continue in the direction
of
Sturm und Drang
thereafter without provoking mirth. Strauss had
killed it as completely as Cervantes had finished off the medieval
romance ; and through somewhat the same methods, although the two
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