Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [215]
When the evening came for the premiere on January 25, 1909, an international audience was assembled including opera directors from every country on the continent and, according to a possibly overwhelmed reporter, “200 distinguished critics.” “All Europe is here,” the hotel porter said proudly to Hermann Bahr, who came from Vienna.
Without overture or prelude the curtain rose as the orchestra thundered out Agamemnon’s theme like the hammer of doom pounding on the great lion gate of Mycenae. No opera had ever opened so stunningly before. When the curtain fell after two hours of demonic intensity the audience sat for some seconds in stupefied silence until the “Straussianer” recovered and began to applaud. An opposition group hissed but most of the audience was too cowed to do anything until the claque won the upper hand and wrung curtain calls and ultimately cheers for the composer. The brutality of the libretto and the outrages upon musical form provoked the usual controversy. To some the music of Elektra seemed no longer music. “Indeed, many serious minded people consider Richard Strauss insane,” wrote one benumbed listener. But on second hearing and at further performances which followed in Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt within four weeks of the premiere, the mastery of Strauss’s score in conveying dread and impending horror leading up to the final murder was undeniable.
Listening to the music Hermann Bahr felt it expressed something sinister about the present time, a pride born of limitless power, a defiance of order “lured back toward chaos,” and a yearning in Chrysothemis for some simple tranquil feeling. Though deeply disturbed he felt it had been a “marvelous evening” and returned to Vienna excited and uplifted. This was what Nietzsche had prescribed.
When it reached London a year later, in February, 1910, notoriety preceded it and musical warfare raged before a note had been heard. Strauss came himself to conduct two performances at a fee of £200 for each. The Daily Mail critic was struck by the sobriety of his gestures. “A tall pale man with smooth brow” whose steel-blue eyes flashed from time to time at singers or musicians, he conducted with head immobile and elbows as if riveted to his body. “He seemed a mathematician writing a formula on a blackboard neatly with supreme knowledge.” After the performance The Times found the opera “unsurpassed for sheer hideousness in the whole of operatic literature,” while the Daily Telegraph reported that “Covent Garden had never previously witnessed a scene of such unfettered enthusiasm.” The rising controversy created a public demand that required Beecham to extend his season. From his point of view it was, excepting the death of King Edward VII some months later, “the most discussed event of the year.” The truth was that by this time it could no longer be heard outside Germany without political overtones. George Bernard Shaw, believing that anti-German hysteria was responsible for the attacks on Elektra, leaned backward to the opposite extreme: In an article in the Nation he wrote that if once he could have said that “the case against the fools and the money changers who are trying to drive us into war with Germany consists in the single word, Beethoven, today I should say with equal confidence, Strauss.” He called Elektra “the highest achievement of the highest art” and its performance “a historic moment in the history of art in England such as may not occur again in our lifetime.”
Strauss recognized that in the style of Salome and Elektra he had gone as far as he could go. Suddenly, as after Heldenleben, having enough of the grand manner, he decided to give the public a comic opera for a change, in the style