Antique 1900s - 1930s Elektra Embossed Cigar Label 🚬 Homage Richard Strauss

Elektra Gold Embossed Cigar Label 🎭 An Homage to Richard Strauss

Size: 7" x 6 1/8"

Absolutely beautiful - and the paper itself is something special, with a fine woven texture you can see in the pictures. A big gilt oval carries ELEKTRA in tall dark letters under a little script monogram in a red-and-gold octagon, and below it a woman in a striped, Egyptian-style headdress and beaded collar, framed in red and gold leaves, with a matching ELEKTRA title strip along the bottom of the sheet. Never used. I have a stack of these, so yours will look just like this one.

🎶 Strauss's Elektra

I read this one as an homage to the opera. Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote his play Elektra in 1903, then turned it into the libretto for Richard Strauss, and the opera opened at the Royal Opera House in Dresden on January 25, 1909, with Annie Krull in the title role - the first of many Strauss and Hofmannsthal collaborations. It was a hit then, and it's still one of the most performed operas from Greek mythology. Or the label may just reach straight back to the myth, the way brands of the day borrowed Cleopatra or Diana for a little ancient glamour - and the Egyptian-style headdress on a Greek princess tells you the artist cared more about drama than about geography. Nobody wrote down which.

🏛️ The Oldest Story on the Shelf

Electra herself goes back about as far as stories go: the daughter of King Agamemnon, whose grief and revenge the Greeks were putting on stage in Athens nearly 2,500 years ago. Aeschylus gave her a part in his Oresteia around 458 BC, and Sophocles and Euripides each wrote a whole play about her.

🪙 The Gold

By the late 1800s cigar labels were embossed and gilded with gold leaf or bronzing, and by 1905 there were some 70,000 small cigar factories registered in this country, every one wanting a label that would jump out of the box lid. Turn this one over and the whole oval is pressed through the back. That kind of stone lithography with real gold was pretty much a lost art after the 1920s, and the heavy stock it was printed on is why the colors still look new. My pictures seriously don't do it justice. This item has reached full antique status.

The artists who drew these were very good and mostly paid very little, with no credit at all - most of them will stay unknown, but we can keep their art alive. Picture it framed in any room of the house.