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By Root 1235 0

again, had withdrawn from the arena, content to despise militarism and materialism and sulk in a tent of superior spiritual values. Its representatives were a caste of professors, clergy, doctors and lawyers who regarded themselves as the Geistaristokratie (aristocracy of the mind) superior to the vulgar rich, the vulgar nobility and the vulgar masses. Unconcerned with social problems, unengaged in politics, they were satisfied with an indoor liberalism which fought no battles and expressed itself in abstract opposition to the regime, in contempt for the Kaiser and in the anti-militarist cartoons of Simplicissimus. They were personified by a professor of philosophy, Georg Simmel, whose lectures in a room overlooking Unter den Linden coincided with the hour of the changing of the guard. At the first sound of the military band Professor Simmel would abruptly stop talking and stand motionless in “an attitude of arrogant disgust and stoical suffering until the barbaric noise had faded away.” Only then would he resume his lecture.

At the centenary celebration of the University of Berlin in 1910, the two Germanys met when the academic community found itself invaded by their fierce-moustachioed monarch in the golden cuirass and golden-eagled helmet of the Garde du Corps, with retinue in gorgeous uniform, heralded by the terrific blasts of a trombone choir. Satisfied that the Kaiser “looked even worse than his caricatures,” the audience consoled itself with the thought that such an intrusion could not trouble their halls again for another hundred years.

Strauss completed the score of Elektra in September, 1908, with his publishers taking it from him page by page. Anticipating the prospect of another succès de scandale, they paid $27,000 for it, almost double the $15,000 paid for Salome, making Strauss’s income from music in 1908 $60,000. The German public’s appetite for sensation had become a habit and four cities competed for the honor of the premiere. Grateful to Schuch, Strauss gave it to Dresden, which in honor of the occasion scheduled a Strauss festival to include Salome, Feuersnot, Sinfonia Domestica and two performances of Elektra—five evenings of Strauss in succession.

Rehearsals of the new opera took place in an atmosphere of uproar; everything was larger, noisier, more violent than life. The score called for the biggest orchestra yet, sixty-two strings including eight bass cellos, forty-five winds including six bass trumpets and a contra-bass tuba, six to eight kettledrums as well as a bass drum, in all a total of about one hundred and twenty. The opera was performed in a single act lasting two hours without intermission with Electra on stage the entire time. Her part was longer than Brünhilde’s in all of The Ring put together and her vocal intervals were considered “unsingable.” The role of Clytemnestra was created by Mme Schumann-Heink, who, finding it “such a desperate one that it nearly killed me,” never sang it again. In places where she was required to sing over the orchestra at fortissimo, Strauss, listening from the stalls, would scream over the din and crash, “Louder, louder, I say! I can still hear the Heink’s voice!”

For a legendary drama set in 1500 B.C. he wanted everything to be “exact and realistic,” insisting on real sheep and bulls for Clytemnestra’s sacrifice. “Gott in Himmel! Strauss, are you mad?” howled the stage director in terror. “Imagine the cost! And the danger! What will they do when your violent music begins?” They would stampede, crash into the orchestra, kill the musicians, even wreck valuable instruments. Strauss was adamant. Von Schuch was called in to add his protest. Only after terrific arguments was Strauss persuaded to yield on the bulls and be content with sheep. Equally realistic in his music, he virtually took the role of words away from von Hofmannsthal. The tinkling of Clytemnestra’s bracelets is heard in the percussion; when Chrysothemis speaks of a stormy night the storm rages in the orchestra; when the beasts are driven to sacrifice the noise of their hoofs makes the listener