GERMAN LETTER
OUR theatre . . . oh, do not let me spend many words on our theatre! It is in decay, like our highways, and like the whole martyred nation whose economic and social collapse the world awaits with such astonishing indifference. Christianity! Have you not yet learned that the cry over "Huns and Barbarians" was not seriously meant, that it was an implement of war, a piece of pious lying propaganda? Shall a noble member of the family of white peoples perish and die before the eyes of her phlegmatic cousins through the fault of an effective but stupid advertisement? . . . I beg forgiveness. I am already quiet. I am speaking of our theatre and am announcing that its condition leaves much to be desired. For some time you have known more about the great voices from our operas than we. Our corps of singers is a little like Demeter's daughter, the lovely Persephone, who was stolen by Pluto (the god of wealth, if I am not mistaken) and persuaded to taste the fruits of his realm, whereby she became his for at least the half of each year. Meanwhile the divine mother (the German public) wanders disconsolately through the devastated fields. Not a bad picture, these devastated fields, to give an idea of the German opera in its entirety. It is going downhill. Naturally the national impoverishment shows up first in this de luxe article. It is threatened with shabbiness, and of all things that is the last quality which can fit with the notion of the opera, the notion of splendour and material luxury. The leaders of this institution are struggling against this depletion; and so the strongest and the most brilliant of them—who are not compelled to struggle under this depletion and to whom the world stands open—are not to be held at their posts, nor is there any adequate substitution for them.
Such was the case with Bruno Walter, who left the Munich opera-house some time ago amid endless ceremonies of departure, after ten years of the most triumphant guidance there as general music conductor. I name him because a short time ago he visited America, where—unless our papers exaggerated patriotically—he
