Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [223]
Voices like that of Rathenau, who did not have quite the courage to sign his own important name but used a pseudonym, were not heard. Such was German national sentiment that when Hauptmann’s Festspiel in honor of the Centenary was produced by Max Reinhardt it was attacked by the Nationalists and closed on demand of the Crown Prince because it stressed liberation rather than the sword which had accomplished it. The mood culminated at Zabern, a small Alsatian town where ill-feeling between the German garrison and the natives provoked German officers to assault and arrest civilians. Becoming a cause célèbre the incident increased foreign hostility to Germany. When Colonel Reuter, the commanding officer of Zabern, was court-martialed and acquitted, the power of the Army over the rights of the citizen became a major political issue in Germany. If Army officers were put beyond the law, said a member of the Center party in the Reichstag, “then finis Germaniae.” He was cheered by the majority, but Colonel Reuter received the Order of the Red Eagle, Third Class, and a congratulatory telegram from the Crown Prince saying, “Keep it up!”
The combination of Richard Strauss and Russian Ballet, awaited as a major event, was scheduled for May, 1914, with the composer conducting. Attempting to sum up his career so far, Lawrence Gilman in January found the same baffling duality in Strauss which had so often troubled historians of his country. His best work, Gilman wrote, as in the opening of Zarathustra, the finale of Don Quixote, the love passage in Heldenleben, the recognition of Orestes and Electra, was music of “terrifying cosmic sublimity” and Elektra, his masterpiece, would someday be recognized as “among the supreme things of music.” Yet he could achieve “a degree of bad taste that passes credibility, be commonplace with a blatancy that sets teeth on edge” and irritate by his “staggeringly complacent habit” of writing music without point or coherence, reason or logic. He always stirred the waters, coming up now with something precious, now with mud, but the activity was indisputable. Gilman, who had not yet heard the Sacre, concluded that Strauss was “unequalled in music as an awakener,… the most dynamic, the most reckless, the most preposterous of all composers,… the most commanding music maker since Wagner.”
Strauss arrived in Paris for rehearsals in April. Nijinsky, for whom the part had been created, was not to play it, having been banished from the company by Diaghilev in a jealous fury because of his marriage. A new young dancer from the Imperial Ballet, Léonide Massine, slim, barely seventeen, with great brown eyes, replaced him. Ida Rubinstein was the Queen and the Spanish painter José Maria Sert supplemented the designs of Bakst. In a Palladian hall with fountains, pillars of gold, marble floors, and ewers of crystal piled with fruit, Potiphar’s wife in scarlet brocade was surrounded by slaves in pink and gold and a bodyguard of gigantic mulattoes in black plumes holding golden whips. Animal life was present in a brace of Russian wolfhounds. A variety of exotic dancers endeavor to relieve the Queen’s “almost passionate weariness of life” in vain, until a shepherd boy, Joseph, is carried in asleep wrapped in yellow silk and who, on waking, dances his search for the divine, instantly arousing the Queen from passionate weariness to passionate desire. Her most strenuous efforts at seduction are repulsed, she denounces Joseph, guards prepare his torture and death and he is saved by an Archangel who carries him off to the sound of heavenly music while Potiphar’s wife strangles herself with her rope of pearls.
Although the libretto was widely ridiculed and the music was considered second-rate