Life, 1910-05-05 · page 30 of 72
Life — May 5, 1910 — page 30: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is a satirical piece mocking contemporary avant-garde opera and "modern music." The cartoon depicts an absurdly overcrowded opera house premiere, while the text parodies a pretentious new opera with nonsensical plot and instrumentation. The satire targets: **The music**: Ridiculous "new instruments" (pishtushes, hipposnorts, Harveyized pot lids) mock experimental composers creating discordant, incomprehensible work. **The plot**: The absurd story—a tenor discovering an electric meter in a Greek temple cellar, a soprano weighing 250 pounds, a janitor throwing people in furnaces—mocks operatic melodrama taken to ridiculous extremes. **The audience**: Depicted as pretentiously cultured ("flowing locks dry cleaned"), willing to pay inflated prices and stand in hallways for incomprehensible art. The core joke: Modern composers are creating nonsensical noise and calling it art, while fashionable audiences pretend to appreciate it. This reflects early-20th-century debates about modernism versus tradition in high culture.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Modern Music miére of the new opera“ Elee- " whose creator is the great- est discordist of modern times The interest is intense. All the musical _ culture of the country is present, with its flowing locks dry cleaned and its ma Lrows furrowed for the occasion. Eve scat upon the upper floors of the vast opera house is filled, while space upon stairways, landings and the passages back of the seats has been sold to standees at fancy prices. In the street a clamorous mob demands admission that even the speculators cannot suppl: As the twelve hundred instrumen: ists of the orchestra take their places on the lower floor they fill it entirely. Some even lop over into the alley outside. Among the new instruments noted are fifty pishtushes, fifty bull bellows, fifty macawettes, eighteen hipposnorts with brass escape pipes and armor plate boiler covers, twenty-three jointed stovepipe elbows with hipless, straighj-front_ middles and forty- eight Harveyized pot lids. After the brief overture of twenty-five’ cast-iron hars the curtain rises with a sive A DAY WITH THE HOUNDS snort of rage. Greek temple. the electric meter. enough and sings his great curse recitative through the fur- nace pipes, so that it is heard throughout the temple. The effect of the clicking of the meter as it hastens to obey his commands is admirably depicted by the orchestra Yellora (soprano) a six-foot, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound vestal virgin attending h priest. of the temple, hears the voice of Damitta through the steam pipes and falls in love with it at first sound She calls back in stentorian tones asking whose the voice is and declaring that its owner is what she calls a man, at the same time emphasizing her remarks by pounding on the register with a huge stone god which she has taken from the altar. Realizing by the force of her language and the vigor of her blows upon the heating apparatus that he has found” his affinity at last, Damitta, anxious to get at her, tears up the great stone staircase, only to be informed by the janitor (bass), who makes his appearance at this juncture, that he must lay it all back again just as he found it. Yellora has by this time slid down one of the furnace flues and, realizing the situation at a glance, is having a catch-as-catch-can wrestling bout with the janitor, whom she at last hurls headlong into the furnace pot. (Great frying motif and crashing of pot lids in orchestra.) Damitta seizes her and attempts to strain her to his blue overalls, only to be held at arm's length and told in soft, ‘The scene represents the cellar of an ancient Damitta (tenor) is discovered trying to read He is furious because it does not register Snortissima, the hij comicbooks.com