Sometimes he hits it and sometimes he doesn't. After two hearings of Ariadne at Naxos in the smaller of the two new royal opera-houses at Stuttgart, I came to the conclusion that both composer and librettist, while greatly daring, had attempted the impossible, and therefore their work, despite its many excellencies, missed fire. In the first place, Herr Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the poet of Elektra and Der Rosercavalier, conceived the unhappy idea that Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme might be butchered to make a Straussian holiday and serve merely as a portico for the one-act opera that follows. But the portico turned out to be too large for the operatic structure. The dovetailing of play and music is at best a perilous proceeding. Every composer knows that. To give two acts of spoken Molière (ye gods! and spoken in German) with occasional interludes of music, and then top it off with a mixture of opera seria and commedia del arte, is to invite a catastrophe. To be sure, the unfailing tact of Strauss in his setting of certain episodes of the Molière play averted a smash-up, but not boredom. In the second place, the rather heavy fooling of the actors, excellent artists all, made Molière as dull as a London fog. The piece is over two hundred and fifty years old; it must be played by French actors, therefore in the German version sadly suffers. I hear that it has been still further cut down, and at the present writing there is some gossip to the effect that Ariadne will be sung some day without the truncated version of Molière by the ingenious Herr Hofmannsthal.
II
At the general rehearsal, the night before the opening, which was attended by the musical élite of Europe (whatever that may mean), poets, critics, managers, composers, princely folk, musical parasites, and other east winds, as Nietzsche has it, the performance went on leaden feet. The acting of Victor Arnold (Berlin) as prosy old Jourdain just bordered on the burlesque; Camilla Eibenschütz, not unknown to New York, cleared the air with her unaffected merriment. Strauss, after a delightful overture in the rococo manner of Grétry, contributes some fascinating dance measures, a minuetto, a polonaise, a gavotte, and a march. The table-music is wholly delightful. A brilliant episode is that of the fencing-master, who is musically pictured by a trumpet and pianoforte (with Max von Pauer at the keyboard). Nothing could be more dazzling. You hear the snapping of the foil in the hand of the truculent bully. The music that accompanies the tailor is capital, as are also the two dances—parodies of the dances in Salome and Elektra—for the kitchen boy, who leaps out of a huge omelette (like the pie-girl years ago in naughty New York), and for a tailor's apprentice. These were both danced with seductive charm by the youthful Grete Wiessenthal (Vienna), and were the bright particular spot of the play.
After a transition, not particularly well done, the curtains part and disclose a stage upon a stage, a problematic question under the most favourable conditions. Herr Jourdain makes by-remarks and interrupts the mimic opera. It is all as antique as the clown at the circus. Finally the opera gets under way and Ariadne publishes her views. Von Hofmannsthal's figure of the deserted lady is not a particularly moving one. Naturally, much must be allowed for the obviously artificial character of the piece. Max Reinhardt, maker of stagecraft and contriver of "atmosphere," has caught the exact shades. In the dinner scene of the play his stage was chastely beautiful. In the gaudy foliage of the exotic island, with the three chandeliers of a bygone epoch, the sharp dissonance of styles is indicated. Aubrey Beardsley would have rejoiced at this mingling of genres; at the figures of Harlequin, Scaramuccio; at the quaint and gorgeous costuming; at the Dryad, Naiad, Echo, and all the rest of seventeenth-century burlesque appanage. And yet things didn't go as they should have gone. The music is sparkling for the minor characters, and for Zerbinetta Strauss has planned an aria, the coloratura of which was to have made Mozart's famous aria for the Queen of Night seem like thirty cents. (I quote the exact phrase of an over-seas admirer.) Well, if Mozart's music is worth thirty cents, then the Zerbinetta aria is worth five; that is the proportion. The fact is the composer burlesques the old-fashioned scene and air with trills and other vocal pyrotechnics, but overdoes the thing. Frieda Hempel was to have sung the part and did not. Margarethe Siems (Dresden) could not. She was as spiritless as corked champagne. To give you an idea of the clumsy humour of the aria it is only necessary to relate that in the middle of the music the singer comes down to the footlights, points to her throat, tells the conductor that she is out of breath, that she must have breathing time if she is to go on. At the general rehearsal this vaudeville act found no favour and the singer was without doubt vocally distressed. An ominous noise from the direction of the conductor's desk (Strauss himself) caused her some embarrassment. She eventually got under way, leaving the audience in doubt as to the success of the experiment—the score shows that it is all in deadly earnest. But the foot-stamping of Strauss and his remarks reminded me of Gumprecht's description of Liszt's B-minor Sonata as the Invitation to Hissing and Stamping. Zerbinetta's vocal flower-garden must be shorn of many roses and lilies before it will be shapely.
Mizzi Jeritza (what ingratiating names they have in Vienna!) was the first Ariadne. In addition to being heartbroken over the perfidy of Theseus she was scared to death. It took some time before her voice grew warm, her acting less stiff. Her new wooer, Hermann Jadlowker (Vienna), was the Bacchus. As you have seen and heard him in New York, I need hardly add that he didn't "look" the part, though he sang with warmth. The three Rhine maidens on dry land were shrill and out of tune. But for the life of me I couldn't become interested in the sorrow and ecstasy, chiefly metaphysical, of this pair. The scheme is too remote from our days and ways. These young persons were make-believe, after all, and while they sonorously declaimed their passion—hers for a speedy death, his for the new life—under a canopy with mother-of-pearl lining (Reinhardt, too, can be very Teutonic), I didn't believe in them, and, I fear, neither did Strauss. He has written sparkling music, Offenbachian music, rainbow music and music sheerly humouristic, yet the entire production reminded one of a machine that wouldn't work at every point.
There were three performances besides the general rehearsal given at the low price of fifty marks (twelve dollars and fifty cents) a performance. One of the jokes of Strauss is to make music-critics pay for their seats. Screams of agony were heard all over the Continent as far north as Berlin, as far south as Vienna. A music-critic dearly hates to pay for a ticket. Hence the Till Eulenspiegel humour of R. Strauss. Hence the numerous "roasts" all his new works receive. He is the most unpopular composer alive with the critical confraternity. No wonder. I simply glory in him. Talk about blood from a stone! Strauss always makes money, even when his operas do not. Stuttgart, most charming of residency cities (it holds over two hundred and fifty thousand souls), was so crowded when I arrived that I was glad I had taken the hint of a friend and engaged a room in advance. The place simply overflowed with strangers. Certainly, I thought, they order these things better in Germany, and was elated because of the enthusiasm openly displayed over Strauss and the two noble opera-houses. All for Strauss? Alas! no. The Gordon Bennet balloon contest had attracted the majority, and until it was fought and done for there was no comfort to be had in café, restaurant, or hotel.
III
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 Tübingen 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-Brügelmann; 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 Acté's is said to rank them all. Wittich, Krull, Destinn, Rose, Walther, Acté, 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.)