Dresden Helen

The Story. When the war was over, when Troy was a city of smoke, Menelaus found Helen and they set sail together, over the ever-moving sea, for Greece. Aithra, the sorceress, was watching them. She called the winds to bring them to her and they came at night, when the palace was dark and the sky was full of storm.

Menelaus had been meaning to kill Helen for her treachery but the rain and the furious waves made him forget his fury. In Aithra's castle drugs made him dream again of stabbing Paris and murdering the casual queen. When he awoke, Helen was lying on a magic couch and he loved her still. Aithra, a witch of kind enchantments, used a charm and made them both gay, forgetting the past.

Helen sang softly while Menelaus was still asleep. They were in a palm grove now, at the foot of an Egyptian mountain where Aithra had carried them by her airy conjurings. Soon she came to them with the chiefs of the desert, carrying presents for the queen. Menelaus was tired of watching men who looked at his wife with an inviting adoration. The chiefs, with their presents, made him sad and jealous.

Helen brewed a cup that would make Menelaus recapture the quietude and comfort that perilous journeyings had stolen. She persuaded him to drink it; the king remembered then the peace he had known before the ships sailed, before the soldiers fought under the city's wall.

This is the story of The Egyptian Helen, an opera by Richard Strauss and Hugo Von Hofmannstahl, which was last week performed for the first time, in Dresden.

The Music. The prelude was bitter and clamorous; a music of heathen sorrow, sharp, scornful, without pity. Then the curtains opened on the castle and the angry music grew less terrible; when Helen and Menelaus entered the dark castle, there was no sound. Later the music was sweet, tender; colored with languor and regret, sometimes derivative and often reminiscent of Strauss's earlier works.

When Helen sang to her sleeping lover, the song was no longer pretty; rich, beautiful, full of hunger and a strange serenity, it leaned and shivered, a beckoning song, as lovely as a tree, as full of life. The desert warriors brought their gifts with a martial music; only at the last, the sorceress and the two she had befriended sang of gentle ease, a contentment long denied; . then the strings were hushed and the horns sounded softly.

The Cast. Elisabeth Rethberg sang the title role; her voice, rich rather than subtle, was suited for the regal role. Her appearance, too, was shining and graceful. In the moment of entering the quiet castle she seemed almost a Helen of Dresden china--until she began to sing. Curt Taucher was Menelaus; a little too noisy, like almost all Germanic tenors, he made the tired king imperiously stalwart. Maria Rajdl sang the part of Aithra; even when she was mixing the draughts and potions upon which the plot depended, she sweetly caroled like a waitress who has sampled the punch which it is her business to brew.

The Composer. Richard Strauss,*if he was pleased with the plaudits which came ringing up to him from the pit, made no show of his delight. Moody, vain, mercenary, sarcastic, selfish, solitary, ruddy of countenance and scornful of demeanor, he has always appeared to detest the adulation which the people who listen to his music have given him, without liking him the better.

He became a composer after a brief, uproarious and distinguished career as a conductor; wrote tone poems which, in the U. S. at least, remain his most popular work. Of these, Don Juan is perhaps the most celebrated; Till Eulenspiegels Merry Pranks (one of the few genuinely comic bits of music ever created) frames in melody the "owl-glass" legends of a fantastic buffoon who once annoyed staunch German burghers; Death and Transfiguration is a profoundly magnificent effort to encompass a theme more holy than most which have engaged its author's attention.

When, in 1905 he began to write operas, Strauss seemed already to have reached the top of his reputation. It was impossible any longer to regard him as a musical poseur, an esthete of loud noises; his phase of being "the new man" was over and he was already established as well as celebrated. Salome, like most of his other works, produced a new storm of discussion. It was performed once in Manhattan but Metropolitan-goers, disgusted with Oscar Wilde, were disgusted with his story on which the opera is based. It has never been given by the Metropolitan since that first unlucky premiere. U. S. opera-patrons liked better Der Rosenkavalier which, although it was not, sometimes seems to have been written for Rosa Raisa of the Chicago Civic Opera Company.

*Not to be confused with Johann Strauss (1825-99) famed composer of waltzes, including The Beautiful Blue Danube.