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Updated: May 29, 2025
But he forgot that Mephisto is a sly and subtle devil. He caricatured him. He made him a buffoon and repulsive. Such extravagance could not have imposed upon Faust or Martha; yet we all agreed that it was very fine, and amiably applauded what no opera-goer of sense could seriously approve.
More poignantly than ever he felt that it was all over and done with him. Where were all the women, the pretty women, the house used to be so full of? Where was that old feeling in the heart as he waited for one of those great singers? Where that sensation of the intoxication of life and of his own power to enjoy it all? The greatest opera-goer of his day! There was no opera now!
Hence we ought to be charitable and condone an occasional slip. But the average opera-goer in this country is anything but charitable. This is as unfair as it is to judge Wagner's dramas by the music alone, and is, indeed a consequence of this attitude.
The castle on the rock, accessible only by balloon, in which every window lights up simultaneously and instantaneously, one minute after sunset, while the full moon is rushing up the sky at the pace of a champion comet that wonderful sea that suddenly opens and swallows up the ship those snow-clad mountains, over which the shadow of the hero passes like a threatening cloud the grand old chateau, trembling in the wind what need, will ask the opera-goer of the future, of your Turners and your Corots, when, for prices ranging from a shilling upwards, we can have a dozen pictures such as these rolled up and down before us every evening?
It is nearly always subsidized by the city to the amount of several thousand florins; but nobody need fall into the error, on this account, of supposing that it is cheap to the opera-goer, as it is in the little German cities.
But with the introduction into Italian music of florid ornamentation, which of itself made the words more or less unintelligible, they lost their due importance, until, as many an old opera-goer still can testify, a tenor like Brignoli could, without protest, habitually allow himself the liberty of substituting "la" for the words on all high notes and phrases, simply because he found it easier to sing them on that syllable.
Boito thinks like a symphonist, and his purpose is profoundly poetical, but its appreciation asks more than the ordinary opera-goer is willing or able to give. Bayard Taylor's Translation. "Mefistofele" had its first performance in New York at the Academy of Music on November 24, 1880. Mlle.
The old Jew seemed eager to join in the struggle, but the staves were in continual swing, and he could not draw near without the risk of having a shoulder dislocated, or, at least, his knuckles severely rapped. In the gloom, his hovering about the involved pair would have led an opera-goer to have seen in him the demon who thus actively presides at the fatal duel of Faust and Valentine.
Now, just as a careless observer of such architectural works hardly notices the lovely figures sculptured on them, so the average opera-goer does not hear the exquisite harmonic and melodic miniature-work in Wagner's music-dramas.
Whether he is supposed to be indignant because somebody has killed his mother, or cheerful because he is going out to fight his country's foes, who are only waiting until he has finished singing to attack the town, he leaves it to the composer to make clear. Also it was Herr Wagner's idea that the back cloth would leave the opera-goer indifferent to the picture gallery.
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