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Rh music express the sexual cruelty and frenzy symbolized in the figure of the dancer. And the Salome of Strauss's score is as little the Salome of Wilde as she is the Salome of Flaubert or Beardsley or Moreau or Huysmans. One cannot help feeling her eminently a buxom, opulent Berliner, the wife, say, of the proprietor of a large department store; a heavy lady a good deal less "dämonisch" and "perverse" than she would like to have it appear. But there are moments when one feels as though Strauss's heroine is not even a Berliner, nor of the upper middle class. There are moments when she is plainly Käthi the waitress at the Münchner Hofbraühaus. And though she declares to Jokanaan that "it is his mouth of which she is enamoured," she delivers the words in her own true-hearted, unaffected brogue.

Nor is Elektra more sharp than Salome, though it oftentimes is the musical equivalent for the massive and violent forms of archaic Greek sculpture that Strauss intended it to be. Elektra herself is perhaps more truly incarnate fury than Salome is incarnate luxury; ugliness and demoniacal brooding, madness and cruelty are here perhaps more sheerly, powerfully expressed than in the earlier score; the scene of recognition between brother and sister is perhaps more large and touching than anything in Salome; Elektra's paean and dance, for all its closeness to a banal cantilena, its tempo di valse so characteristic of the later Strauss, is perhaps more grandiosely and savagely triumphant than the dancer's scene with the head. Nevertheless, the work is by no means realized. It is formally impure, a thing that none of the earlier tone-poems are. Neither style nor shape is deeply felt. Both are superficially and externally conceived, and nothing so conclusively demonstrates it than the extreme ineffectuality of the moments of contrast with which Strauss has attempted to relieve the dominant mood of his work. Just as in Salome the more restless and sensual passages, lazily felt as they are, are nevertheless infinitely more significant than the intensely contrasting silly music assigned to the Prophet, so too, in Elektra, the moments when Strauss is cruel, brutal, ugly are of a much higher expressiveness than those in which he has sought to write beautifully. For whereas in moments of the first sort the lions of the Mycenae gates do at times snarl and rage, in those of the second it is the Teutonic beer-mug that makes itself felt. Elektra laments her father in a very pretty and undistinguished melody, and entreats her sister