Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [224]
The company went to London at the end of May for a two-month season of “extraordinary success.” Chaliapin was declared “supreme” as Ivan the Terrible, Rimsky’s last opera, Coq d’Or, and Stravinsky’s new one, The Nightingale, were acclaimed and the “ultra-modern” Joseph to be given on June 23 with the composer again conducting, aroused eager expectations. At rehearsals with Karsavina, who had replaced Ida Rubinstein, Strauss demonstrated how he wanted her to perform her dance of seduction. Starting from the far corner of her dressing room and singing the music “he would run, trampling heavily across the room, to the sofa representing the couch of Joseph.”
On the night of the performance Drury Lane was crowded to the last seat by a bejewelled and brilliant audience “keyed up to concert pitch for a memorable event.” To a young man among them, jostled by bare shoulders and gay laughter, everyone seemed to know one another as if at “an enormous but exclusive party.” In the presence of the Prime Minister and Mrs. Asquith, the Russian company and the renowned composer, it seemed “an occasion of almost international importance.” As applause filled the house the young man, leaning forward from his seat in the dress circle, could see the tall “world-weary” German composer take up his stand before the orchestra, “pink and imperturbable.”
If the music won no new laurels, Strauss’s visit was personally satisfying. He conducted the Queen’s Hall Orchestra in a program of his own and Mozart’s music, which was considered one of the finest concerts of the season. On June 24 wearing the “most beautiful of all the Doctors’ robes,” the crimson silk and cream-colored brocade of a Doctor of Music, he received an honorary degree from Oxford.
A month later on July 25 the Russian Ballet closed its season with a joint performance of Strauss’s Joseph and Stravinsky’s Petrouchka. At the same hour that evening in Belgrade the Serbian reply to an Austrian ultimatum was rejected by the Austrian Ambassador, who announced the severance of relations and left for home.
*There’s only one King’s City,
Vienna’s its name;
There’s only one Robber’s Nest,
Berlin is the name.
7
Transfer of Power
ENGLAND : 1902–11
7
Transfer of Power
LORD SALISBURY, who had died in 1903, was not on hand to see the workings of democracy in the first major election of the new century, but he would not have been surprised. A new segment of society was rising, not yet to take the patricians’ place, but by its pressure and through its surrogates to push them aside. The age of the people was under way.
It revealed itself in the cry “Pigtail!” which echoed through the constituencies in the General Election of 1906 with virulence equal to its irrelevance. No issue proved more exploitable than “Chinese Slavery” and the Liberals played it up as designedly as the Tories had used patriotic slogans in the Khaki Election of 1900. The slaves in question were indentured Chinese labour imported with the consent of the Unionist government to mine gold in South Africa. Billboards flamed with pictures of Chinese in chains, Chinese being kicked, Chinese being flogged. Sandwich men dressed as Chinese slaves paraded the streets. Cartoons showed the ghosts of British soldiers killed in the Boer War pointing to the fenced compounds where the Chinese were lodged and asking, “Did we die for this?” Working-class audiences were told the Tories would introduce Chinese labour into England if they won and pictures of a pigtailed coolie in a straw hat were labeled “Tory British Workingman.” Thrown on a lantern screen at political meetings, the pictures, reported Graham Wallas, a Liberal sympathizer, aroused “an instantaneous howl