The performances of earlier Strauss works were in the main well
attended. Oddly enough the poorest house--and it was far from
empty--was that of The Rosecavalier. Possibly because the composer had
gone over to Tuebingen to conduct a concert there (he always makes hay
while the Strauss shines), there was so little enthusiasm displayed;
possibly also because Max Schillings conducted. He is an excellent
composer, a practical conductor, but he couldn't extract the "ginger"
in the score--and it's full of it, full of fire, of champagne, of
dreamy sentiment and valses that would turn gray with envy the hair of
Johann Strauss if he hadn't thought of them before his namesake
Richard. I didn't grow enthusiastic over the Stuttgart production,
mainly a local affair. The honours of the evening rightfully belonged
to Alwin Swoboda, who looked like De Wolf Hopper, but sang a trifle
better. A favourite there is Iracema-Bruegelmann; another, Erna
Ellmenreich. One can sing, but acts amateurishly; the other screams,
but is a clever actress. In Salome she was wonderful, singing out of
tune as she often did. Her pose was hieratic as a sphinx when she
watched the antics of the neurasthenic Herod. And her dance was one of
the best I have yet seen, though Aino Acte's is said to rank them all.
Wittich, Krull, Destinn, Rose, Walther, Acte, not one of them ever
sang as sang Olive Fremstad at that memorable dress rehearsal of a
certain Sunday morning in the Metropolitan Opera-House. Vocally she
was the Salome of Richard Strauss, and she was lovely to behold.
Salome herself should be a slight, cynical young person--half
Flaubert, half Laforgue. Under Strauss the Salome is neither
impossible nor vulgar. Very intense, an apparition rather than a
human, she sounds the violet rays of eroticism (if I may be forgiven
such a confusion of terms, of such a mixed metaphor). Another thing:
the tempi were different from Campanini's--_i. e._, the plastic
quality of the reading gave us new colours, new scents, new curves.
Strauss is careless when he directs the works of others, but with his
own he is all devotion. Take Elektra, for instance.
But I must finish my Salome budget. The Herod was not the actor that
was Karl Burrian, but he sang better. His name is Josef Tyssen. The
John was Herman Weil. Salome was preceded by Feuersnot, the folks-tone
of which is an admirable foil to the overladen tints of Salome. (By
the way, the sky in the latter opera showed the dipper constellation,
Charles's Wain. Now, will some astronomer tell us if such a thing is
possible in Syrian skies?) Herman Weil was the chief point of
attraction. As for the so-called immoral ending of the composition,
discovered by amateur critical prudes, to be forthright in my speech,
it is all nonsense: it doesn't exist. But Wolzogen doesn't follow the
lines of the Famine of Fire. His is a love scene with a joke for
relief. The music is ultra-Wagnerian, the finale genuine Strauss, with
its swelling melos, its almost superhuman forcing of the emotional
line to the ecstatic point.
In Elektra, with the composer conducting, I again marvelled at the
noisy, ineffective "reading" of a Hammerstein conductor, whose name
I've forgotten. Yet New York has seen the best of Elektras, Mme.
Mazarin--would that she had sung and danced here in Stuttgart! She
might have surprised the composer--but New York is yet to hear Elektra
as music-drama. Thus far I think (and it's only one man's opinion)
that Strauss will endure because 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 buildings. His
Majesty Wilhelm II, a liberal and enlightened monarch, dipped heavily
into his private bank account. Stuttgart, according to the intendant,
Graf zu Putlitz, must become the leading operatic and art city in
Germany. The buildings are there, but not yet the singers. Dresden
boasts its opera, and Berlin has better singers. Nevertheless, the
pretty city, surrounded by villa-crowned hills, is to be congratulated
on such classic temples of music and drama.