The most trumpeted operatic composer of to-day is the worst of operatic sinners. Nothing could be more debasing to music and to drama than the method Strauss employs in “Electra.” In its original form “Electra” is a play of profound significance, whose art, philosophy, and ethics are a natural expression of Greek life and thought. It contains ideas and it presents actions which, while totally alien to us, we accept as belonging to that life and thought. In the original, or in any good translation, its simplicity and its elemental grandeur are calculated to move us deeply, for we achieve a historical perspective and see the meaning and significance of the catastrophe which it presents. This great story our modern composer proceeds to treat pathologically. Nothing is sacred to him. He invests every passion, every fearful deed with a personal and immediate significance which entirely destroys its artistic and its historical sense. The real “Electra” is an impersonal, typical, national, and religious drama; Hofmannsthal and Strauss have made it into a seething caldron of riotous, unbridled passion. The lead given by Strauss in “Salome,” “Electra,” and, in different form or type, in “Der Rosenkavallier” has been quickly followed. “The Jewels of the Madonna” is an “Electra” of the boulevard, in which the worst sort of passion and the worst sort of sacrilege are flaunted openly in the name of drama. It belongs in the “Grand Guignol.” Let any reasonable person read the librettos of current operas and form an opinion, not of their morals,--for there is only one opinion about that,--but of their claims on the attention of any serious-minded person. I refer to the moral status of these stories only because many of them stress the abnormal and lack a sense of proportion. Art seeks the truth wherever it be, but the truth is the whole truth and not a segment of it. A novel may represent almost any phase of life, but it must keep a sense of proportion. Dostoïevsky pushes the abnormal to the extreme limit, but on the other hand he is “a brother to his villains” and he gives us plenty of redeeming types. The hero in “The Idiot” is a predominating and _overbalancing_ character. The object of all great literature is to present the truth in terms of beauty. “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” is as moral as “Emma.” But the further one gets from a deliberate form of artistic expression like the novel, the less latitude one has in this respect. An episode in a novel of Dostoïevsky would be an impossible subject for a picture. So opera, which focuses itself for us in the stage frame and within a limited time, must somehow preserve for itself this truthfulness and fidelity to life as it is. “The Jewels of the Madonna” might serve as an episode in a novel of Dostoïevsky, or of Balzac; as an opera libretto it is a monstrosity. IV. WHEN MUSIC AND DRAMA ARE FITLY JOINED