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Maitland's contribution was a beautifully trained light soprano, but the Caruso of the company was Herr Otto Bernhard; amazing that a man of his sensual nature and proclivities should be gifted with a voice fit to swell heaven's choir. He sang Wagner, Gounod, Schubert with absolute impartiality, as well as numbers of melting German lieder and touching English ballads.
And he has proved it by the absolute fearlessness of his judgments on art; for not only has he reasoned soundly against Wagner, but dared to criticise the weaknesses of Gluck and Mozart, the errors of Weber and Berlioz, and the accepted opinions about Gounod; and this classicist, who was nourished on Bach, goes so far as to say: "The performance of works by Bach and Händel to-day is an idle amusement," and that those who wish to revive their art are like "people who would live in an old mansion that has been uninhabited for centuries."
From the story drawn from the records of the Bohemian law court, it is plain that to make a compact with the Wild Huntsman was a much more gruesome and ceremonious proceeding than that which took place between Faust and the Evil One in the operas of Gounod and Boito.
When he left the hospital he returned to Melihovo and prepared to go abroad. He went first to Biarritz, but there he was met by bad weather. Here he stayed for a considerable time at the Pension Russe in the Rue Gounod. He seemed to be fully satisfied with the life there.
Wandering on to an eminence, his discouraged eye swept but a fresh horizon of apple-trees and heads of barley, and he was about to turn back when a strange sound suddenly arrested his steps. It was a concert of voice and instruments, which in this lost solitude seemed to him like a dream, or a miracle. The music was good-even excellent. He recognized a prelude of Bach, arranged by Gounod.
Nearly every one boasts its pipe organ imported from Europe, and in the choir lofts you may find the great vellum-leaved folios of manuscript music, with their three-cornered, square, and diamond-shaped notes. They know little of the masses of Mozart, Gounod, or more modern composers, but they know the Gregorian chants, and the later compositions of the Middle Ages.
She has shown originality in other than operatic fields, and her greatest work is a Mass in D. This is a composition of decided merit, and is full of sustained dignity and breadth of style. It is intensely modern in quality, and its expressive feeling is somewhat reminiscent of Gounod, but it is not in any sense an imitation of the great Frenchman.
They both sang and acted to perfection; but Wagner pooh-poohed at them and everything else. Abscheulich and graesslich alternated in his condemning sentences. Nothing pleased him. He fidgeted about and was very cross during the fifth act, where the ballet is danced. "Why did Gounod insert that idiotic ballet? It is banal and de trop."
But while there is renunciation in the simplicity of Liszt, who threw aside worldly finery to wear the frock of a penitent, on the contrary Gounod appears to return to his original bent with an almost holy joy. This is easily explained. Liszt finished his life in a cassock, while Gounod began his in one.
In the original version of the opera there was a commonplace cavatina allotted to Juliet at this point, set to words which had but a remote connection with Shakespeare's immortal lines, but it was so completely unworthy of the situation that it was usually omitted, and when the opera was revised for production at the Grand Opéra in 1888, Gounod thought it wiser to end the act with the Friar's discourse to Juliet, rather than attempt once more to do justice to a scene which he knew to be beyond his powers.
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