Do you shy at the strains that are sober? Does Wagner no longer inflame? Do you find that the music of Auber And Elgar is equally tame? Do you read without blushing or winking The novels of Elinor Glyn? Do you constantly hanker, when rinking, For draughts of sloe gin? If I am correct in divining The tortures you daily endure, Don't waste any time in repining, But try this infallible cure: With the sharpest of musical _plectra_ Go pluck at your soul till it's raw; In a word, go and witness _Elektra_-- Give up the jig-saw. [Illustration: STARS IN OPPOSITION; OR, THE "RECORD" OPERATIC DUEL] _Salome_, so far as the book was concerned, was a tertiary deposit. Heine, in a few masterly stanzas in his fantastic narrative poem _Atta Troll_, tells the old legend of the unholy love of the daughter of Herodias for John the Baptist. Therein may be found the essence of Wilde's play, adapted to form the libretto of the opera. _Punch_, who attended the dress rehearsal, gives an interesting account of his experiences, but shirks the task of criticizing the opera: for that, as he observes, "no vocabulary could be too large or peculiar." But he mentions one orchestral interlude, in which "there was one sound, painfully iterated, like the chirrup of a sick hen, which appeared to come from some part of the violin that is usually left alone." At the close of June, 1914, Strauss's _Légende de Joseph_ was produced at Covent Garden by Sir Thomas Beecham with the Russian Ballet. _Punch_ abstained from detailed musical criticism, but condemned the "vulgar animalism" of the piece which he regarded as "a false move in every way," and his view cannot be laid down to prudery or Philistinism, since it was shared by many of the most devoted admirers of Strauss. Nor can he be charged with a wholesale depreciation of German music in view of the tribute to Humperdinck's _Hänsel und Gretel_, which appeared in his pages a few months earlier:-- [Sidenote: _Homage to Humperdinck_] How strange that modern Germany, so gruesome in her Art, Where sheer sardonic satire has expelled the human heart, Should also be the Germany that gives us, to our joy, The perfect children's opera--pure gold without alloy. I know there are admirers of the super-normal Strauss Who hold him, matched with others, as a mammoth to a mouse, And, though they often feel obliged his lapses to deplore, His "cerebral significance" increasingly adore. In parts I find him excellent, just like the curate's egg, But not when he is pulling the confiding public's leg; Besides, the height of genius I never could explain As "an infinite capacity for giving others pain."