With the sharpest of musical plectra
Go pluck at your soul till it's raw;
In a word, go and witness Elektra—
Give up the jig-saw.
STARS IN OPPOSITION; OR, THE "RECORD" OPERATIC DUEL
Salome, so far as the book was concerned, was a tertiary deposit. Heine, in a few masterly stanzas in his fantastic narrative poem Atta Troll, tells the old legend of the unholy love of the daughter of Herodias for John the Baptist. Therein may be found the essence of Wilde's play, adapted to form the libretto of the opera. Punch, who attended the dress rehearsal, gives an interesting account of his experiences, but shirks the task of criticizing the opera: for that, as he observes, "no vocabulary could be too large or peculiar." But he mentions one orchestral interlude, in which "there was one sound, painfully iterated, like the chirrup of a sick hen, which appeared to come from some part of the violin that is usually left alone." At the close of June, 1914, Strauss's Légende de Joseph was produced at Covent Garden by Sir Thomas Beecham with the Russian Ballet. Punch abstained from detailed musical criticism, but condemned the "vulgar animalism" of the piece which he regarded as "a false move in every way," and his view cannot be laid down to prudery or Philistinism, since it was shared by many of the most devoted admirers of Strauss. Nor can he be charged with a wholesale depreciation of German music in view of the tribute to Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel, which appeared in his pages a few months earlier:—
Homage to Humperdinck
How strange that modern Germany, so gruesome in her Art,
Where sheer sardonic satire has expelled the human heart,