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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.

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.

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. 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.

Phaedra and Elektra, not even so virtuous as Mary, who failed of being what she should be!

However, Elektra needs no apology, and the joyous Rosenkavalier is a distinct addition to the repertory of high-class musical comedy. Strauss is an experimenter and no doubt a man for whom the visible box-office exists, to parody a saying of Gautier's. But we must judge him by his own highest standard, the standard of Elektra, Don Quixote, and Till Eulenspiegel, not to mention the beautiful songs.

It is also in tempo di valse that Chrysothemis declares her need of wifehood and motherhood. As an organism the work does not exist. But even the expressiveness and considerability of "Salome" and "Elektra," limited and unsatisfactory as they are, are wanting in the more recent works.

Ziegler, who had methodically according to a fixed plan lived in all European capitals except Paris whither he was soon going, said that Mr. Spatt was quite wrong, and that Milan could not hold a candle to Munich. Mrs. Spatt inquired whether Audrey had heard Strauss's Elektra at the Paris Opera House. Audrey replied that Strauss's Elektra had not been given at the Paris Opera House.

Manders was a dark-bearded man, big for the North-West Police. He had two hobbies. One was trouble in the Balkans, which he was always prophesying. The other was a passion for Sophocles, which he read in the original from a pocket edition. Start him on the chariot race in "Elektra" and he would spout it while he paced the cabin and gestured with flashing eyes.

Many of the new operas, Carmen, La Dolores, Salome, Elektra, to name a few, call for interpretative dancing of the first order. Madama Butterfly and Lakmé demand a knowledge of national characteristics. Pelléas et Mélisande and Ariane et Barbe-Bleue require of the interpreter absolutely distinct enunciation.

As well as a mere layman could gather from the opening proceedings, this opera of Elektra was what the life story of the Bender family of Kansas would be if set to music by Fire-Chief Croker.