Schwierige. I am as a matter of fact very closely associated with all these people and enterprises, both with Reinhardt's theatre and with a great deal of Richard Strauss's activities; I do not think this a cause for being ceremonious, however, but all the more reason to believe that I can speak with perfect freedom and authenticity.
As you probably know, Richard Strauss has been the director of Vienna's grand opera for the last three years. He is working in conjunction with Franz Schalk, one of the most earnest and cultivated musicians and orchestra leaders on the continent. But Schalk, as the actual permanent head of this large institution, is too conscientious to do much directing elsewhere with the one exception of Rome, where he gives a few concerts each year. As a consquence he is much less widely known in other countries, including America, than many who are vastly inferior to him in the soundness of their musical knowledge. As in Berlin, Munich, and Dresden, the Vienna opera will be a repertoire house after the old European model. The complete works of Richard Wagner are on its programme, and over against this the major part of Mozart, constant works by Gluck, Weber, Meyerbeer, Rossini, a great deal of Verdi, naturally Carmen and Gounod's Faust, and much of the moderns, Pfitzner and Debussy as well as Puccini. Out of all this enormous repertoire Strauss has cut himself one separate section on which to specialize: the operas of Mozart, for which he is not only an incomparable conductor, but also a very sensitive and skilful stage-manager, and his own operas, which are all in the repertoire. He has recently added to these the Josefslegende, a ballet he composed for Diaghilev's company and which they produced in Paris and London just before the great war, with Fokine as choreographer and Bakst as painter. The last London performance was on the first or second of August, 1914. Diaghilev—how far off they seem to me now, those May days of 1913 when we all sat together at the Crillon in Paris discussing these things and a thousand more plans for pantomimes, ballets, and other dumb-shows!—Diaghilev had asked me to find a subject for a ballet-pantomime of a somewhat serious nature which would give Strauss the opportunity for a broadly-limned, rather decorative kind of music; the treatment should unite the talents of Strauss, Bakst, and Fokine, who was at that time still a ballet-master. It was soon clear to me that I should choose a Biblical subject; but I was vacillating between old David with the wife of Uriah and young Joseph with the wife of Potiphar when the thought of Nijinsky lent more
