BROOKLYN ACADEMY OF MUSIC The Little Orchestra Society THOMAS SCHERMAN, Music Director WILLIAM WYMETAL, Stage Director ANNUAL SUBCSRIPTION SERIES-SEASON 1966-67 Final Concert-Series B- Sunday Afternoon, April 9, 1967 at 2:30p.m. HERBERT BARRBIT, Manaier Richard Strauss Die Aegyptische Helena Libretto by Hugo von Hofmannstbal Helena ..............•.................. ... ...... Lynn Owen Menelaus . .... ... .....................•..........William Olvis Aitbra, an Egyptian Sorceress .....•................. Elisabeth Carron Altair ......................................•.•.. Adib Fazab Da-ud, his son .................................... Kenneth Riegel 1st Servant to Aithra .................. .. .. ........ Ann Gardner 2nd Servant to Aithra ...........•......••...•...... Elisabeth Farmer 1st Elf ............................... .... ...•.. Barbara Blanchard 2nd Elf .. ...... .. .... ............. .. ......... Shirley Chester 3rd Elf ........................................•. Ellen Alexander 4th Elf ....... ... .. ........... ... .. ............. Jenneke Barton The Omniscient Sea-Shell .................... ...... Mary Davenport Elves, Soldiers and Slaves Act I An island off the coast of Egypt Act II An oasis near the Atlas mountains THERE WILL BE AN INTERMISSION FOLLOWING ACT I The Baldwin is the official piano of The Little Orchestra Society The Egyptian Helen HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL The fantasy of the home voyage of Helen and Menelaus began reflecting in my mind in 1920-glistening and unreachable, like half-covered running water. Then a kind of curiosity took hold of this fantasy; it was directed at these mythical forms as if at living persons. During the night in which the Greeks forced their way into flaming Troy, Mene­ laus must have found his wife in one of those burning palaces and brought her out from between walls that were crashing down, this woman who was his beloved stolen wife and at the same time the most beautiful woman in the world, the cause of this war, of the plain full of dead men, and at the same time the widow of Paris and the beloved of ten or twelve other sons of Priam-and thus the widow of these young princes too! What a situation for a husband! It is beyond imagination-and any dramatist is certain that not even a Shakespeare's words would be adequate to it. I am certain that Menelaus took this woman, who even in this situation was still the most beautiful woman in the world, silently away. He took her out of the city, down to the sea and his ship. What happened then, we do not know. But some years later the son of Oedipus traveled the kingdom of Greece searching for news of his vanished father. What he finds upon reaching Sparta is narrated in the clearest of pictures in the fourth book of the Odyssey, in colors as fresh as if painted yesterday. We find Menelaus, a noble and hospitable lord, "beautiful as a god" and Helen as the mistress of his palace. She is as beautiful as ever. In this peaceful landscape-seemingly happy-they are celebrating the marriages of their children, talk­ ing about Troy and the war in the way one talks of things past. Menelaus speaks with calm dignity, of the great event in his life; but Helen in that superior, sovereign manner that Homer always gives her-touching lightly on the past and her guilt in an elegant and right way, saying of the war (only as an indication of time) : when the Achaens "on account of my dog-face" had a hard time there and when because of my unfortunate flirtation, this thing happened, which is too well known and too unpleasant for us to dwell upon. How astonishing it is to treat such a famous and terrible event in this easy way, and also how modern, how close to the forms of expression of our time. And how far from the pompous and uncertain ways of expression of eras lying in between. But, one cannot help asking, what happened in the meantime? What happened to these two between that night in the past and this comfortable situation in which Telemachus finds them? Then there is the Helena of Euripides, the only ancient story that deals with this period of time: Helen and Menelaus on the way back from Troy. In it appears the theme of a "phantom" Helen- that second Helen, not the Trojan, but the Egyptian one. We are on the Egyptian owned island of Pharos, before a royal palace. Menelaus enters, alone, on the way back from Troy. For months his ship has been driven from one shore to another, always kept from home. He has left Helen, his re-conquered bride, with his warriors in a hidden cove and goes to seek an oracle that will instruct him as to how to find the way home. Then, from the colonnade of the palace, comes Helen, not the beautiful, all too famous one he had left in the ship, but another and yet the same Helen. She declares she is his wife--the other one on the ship was a phantom, a deceitful image that Hera had put into Paris' arms to delude the Greeks. For the sake of this phantom tens of thousands of the best men had been slain, the most flourishing city in Asia was reduced to ashes. But meanwhile Helen, the only real Helen, had been carried overseas by Hermes and lived in old Proteus' palace, honored and protected by him. Now his son, whose only desire was to marry Helen, was on the throne. Thus the thing for Menelaus, to whom she had always been faithful, to do was to take her away quickly and secretly. It is not surprising that Menelaus does not immediately give credit to this being, who appears before him only to tell him that for ten years be bad been at war over a vision, had sacrificed the blood of Greeks to a phantom, had burned down a great city, and was now returning home with a vision. They dispute for some time, with the keen arguments typical of Euripides, and from his tongue comes this splendid saying: "I believe the mass of sorrows suffered there more than I believe you." This absolution from such fearful guilt must have seemed all too easy to him. But then a messenger arrives and reports that the being they bad thought was Helen has disappeared from the ship in a streak of flaming air. What else can Menelaus do but hold on to the only being that is left, one who is pure and innocent of the bargain-and escape with her before the Egyptian king takes her away from him too. That is how far Euripides takes us. But if the Trojan war had been waged over a phantom and this, the Egyptian Helen, was the only real one, then the Trojan war had been a bad dream, and it all falls apart into two halves-a ghost story and an idyll with no connection between them. I forgot Euripides but my imagina­ tion kept on turning this episode of the married couple returning together, and the fearful and finally reconciling things that could have gone on between them around in my mind. The whole thing seemed so mysterious to me, soluble only by magic: but magic solves nothing for our feelings. Forces of nature must have played a part, an atmosphere of the moving, indifferent but helpful beings of nature. Less to heal the demi-goddess, Helen, than Menelaus; how terribly destroyed his soul must have been! So much fate, so many involvements and so much guilt-and be was only a human being. The noble, tragic aspect of this mu~h-mocked figure appeared to me at once. For me be was the embodiment of the Occidental; in Helen was the never exhausted strength of the Orient. He stood for law, marriage and fatherhood. She rose above all that, an exotic, elusive goddess. In my not ~- book is this saying of Bacbofen's entered years ago: "Helen was not given all the graces of Pandora to devote herself to exclusive possession by any one man." Two or three years later I asked Strauss to wait for me in his office at the Opera. "I am going to tell you," I said, "a story in two acts. It may be an opera. When the curtain rises, we are in a palace by the sea. The palace belongs to a beautiful young enchantress, who is the daughter of a king and the beloved of Poseidon." "Does Poseidon appear?" "No, Poseidon does not appear. No gods at all. Tbis young enchantress-! call her Aithra-is left alone by her lover much of the time. But it is always possible that he will arrive. So she bas the table set for two every evening, and it is set for two now. She has female servants and a well-furnished house, but not much company." "Didn't you say that she is an enchantress?" "Yes, she can do a bit of magic. You will see. Among the furnisbings of the room we are in is a conch, wbicb knows everything that is going on out at sea, and to entertain Aithra tells her everything she knows. This evening the conch reports that a sbip, in wbich something remarkable is happening, is passing by some way off. A man on the sbip leaves the helm and goes down into the cabin. He looks at a very beautiful woman who is sleeping there, gently covers her face with a cloth, then draws a curved dagger and prepares to kill her. 'Send a storm there at once!' the conch cries out, excited at her own tale, 'otherwise the woman will die!'" "Can Aitbra do this?" "Yes. The storm tears the sbip apart and prevents the murder. But before that Aithra had asked who this woman and man could be- and the conch has said it was Helen of Troy and her husband Menelaus.