TOPICAL READING.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 10049, 23 May 1910, Page 4

TOPICAL READING.

BERNARD SHAW ON STRAUSS

Mr Bernard Shaw pays the highest tribute to Strauss's "Elektra." which was such a success'at Covent Garden. Speakinj; of the task which Hoftmanstahl and Strauss have achieved, he says:—"Not even in the third scene of 'Das Rheingold," or in the Klingsor scenes in 'Parsifal.' is there such an atmosphere of malignant and can-1 cerous evil as we get here, and that the power with which it is done is not the power of the evil itself, but of the passion that detests and must and finally can destroy that evil, is what makes the work great, and makes us rejoice in its horror. Whoever understands this, however vaguely, will understand Strauss'a music, and why the crowded house burst into frenzied shoutings, not merely of applause, but of strenuous assent and affirmation, as the curtain fell. That the power of conceiving it should occur in the same individual as the technical skill and natural faculty needed to achieve its complete and overwhelming expression m music, is a stroke of the rarest good fortune that can befall a generation of men. In this masic drama Strauss has done for us just what he has done for his own countrymen: he has said for us, with an utterly satisfying force, what all the . noblest powers of life within us are clamouring to have said, in protest against and defiance of the omnipresent villainies of our civilisation; and this is the highest achievement of the highest art." Mr Shaw adds that this was a historic moment in the history of art in England such as may not occur again within our lifetime.