[Footnote: For the story of "Salome" in New York, see my "Chapters of Opera" (Henry Holt & Co., New York), p.

343 et seq.] Now Mr.Hammerstein came to continue the artistic education which the owners of the Metropolitan Opera House had so strangely and unaccountably checked.

Salome lived out her mad life in a short time, dying, not by the command of Herod, but crushed under the shield of popular opinion.

The operation, though effective, was not as swift as it might have been had operatic conditions been different than they are in New York, and before it was accomplished a newer phase of Strauss's pathological art had offered itself as a nervous, excitation.

It was "Elektra," and under the guise of an ancient religious ideal, awful but pathetic, the people were asked to find artistic delight in the contemplation of a woman's maniacal thirst for a mother's blood.