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Guarda che bianca luna Il tempo passato Lascia ch' io pianga Dolce far niente Batti batti nel Masetto Da capo Ritardando Andante Piano Adagio Spaghetti Macaroni Polenta Non e ver Ah, non giunge Si la stanchezza Bravo Lento Presto Scherzo Dormi pura La ci darem la mano Celeste Aida Spirito gentil Voi che sapete Crispino e la Comare Pieta, Signore Tintoretto Boccaccio Garibaldi Mazzini Beatrice Cenci Gordigiani Santa Lucia Il mio tesoro Margherita Umberto Vittoria Colonna -Tutti frutti Botticelli Una furtiva lagrima.

Donizetti, as we have seen, enriched the repertory of opera buffa with several masterpieces of gay and brilliant vivacity, but few of the lighter works of his contemporaries deserve permanent record. The story is a happy combination of farce and féerie. Crispino, a half-starved cobbler, is about to throw himself into a well, when La Comare, a fairy, rises from it and bids him desist.

One would feel obliged to draw more attention to the way he often adorned or perverted the truth if one did not feel it arose from his irrepressible and glowing imagination far more than from any intention to mislead; for I believe his real nature to have been a-very straightforward one. I will quote the story of his friend Crispino, a young countryman from Tivoli, as a characteristic example.

In the Sacristy of the Friars of the Carmine is a picture by the hand of the same master, wherein is a very beautiful Nativity of Our Lady, with some nurses; and on the corner near the Piazza de' Tolomei he painted in fresco, for the Guild of Shoemakers, a Madonna with the Child in her arms, S. John, S. Francis, S. Rocco, and S. Crispino, the Patron Saint of the men of that Guild, who has a shoe in his hand.

In a note he added, "This is a lie, and is the result of an artist's tendency to aim at effect. I never kicked Crispino." But Berlioz took care afterwards to omit this note. One attaches as little importance to his other small boasts as to this one.

Crispino follows her directions, and speedily becomes famous, but success turns his head, and he is only brought back to his senses by a strange dream, in which the fairy takes him down to a subterranean cavern where the lamp of each man's life is burning and he sees his own on the point of expiring.

Following the priests were a number of the townsmen who make it their business to escort the friars. "May God reward them also in the next life," muttered old Tasio as he went away. The play began with Chananay and Marianito in Crispino é la comare.