Word: agamemnon
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...second act, and does stop in the third. Yet if one understands what is going on in Wagner's orchestra, Tristanfrom beginning to end is a blaze of emotional excitement; and if one understands what is going on in the orchestra ("dancing-place" of the Chorus) in the Agamemnon, the blaze of intellectual excitement is almost unbearable... As if Beethoven, a poet of comparable dimensions, had written three, or four, expository cadenzas stating the thematic content of the whole work in the first movement of a violin or pianoforte concerto...
...Doane Gardiner, as Herald, a track athlete in private life, entered running at a plausibly pelting long-distance pace, yet with breath enough to deliver quite stunningly and with graphic gestures the dreadful Messenger's Speech of the fleet storm-wrecked on it homeward voyage. Mr. Perley Noyes's Agamemnon was a king out of the Iliad, quite as intended by Aeschylus, and Mr. Alfred Longfellow Benshimol's Aegisthos, a brilliant, sparkling daredevil, jubilantly and dangerously off his guard...
...able to convey much of its pity and terror. This scene has everything. She is not mad; on the contrary, she is the one person sane. Seeress, she can see the crimes already wreaked under that roof, and foresee the two about to follow, the murder of Agamemnon and of herself. Her speeches begin with little more than unintelligible bird-like cries of mantic possession, but gradually clarify to explicit prophecy, yet all opaque to the listeners ... The Queen reappears to order her indoors. Cassandra stands still, rapt and benumbed, in her chariot where she has been left when...
...Earth. It concludes with that heart-piercing line, "It is not myself, but the life of man I pity." So saying, this Cassandra, pulling her mantle over her face, rushes with outspread arms to the palace doors, blindly throws them open, and disappears without another sound. But Agamemnon's death cries are heard...
...This review, written fifty-seven years after the performance, is in part to ask whether a university which in 1906 could magnificently produce the Agamemnon in Greek in the Stadium cannot now in the Loeb Theatre, annually at Easter, stage performances in English of Goethe's Faust...