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What a night it had been! Do you recall it?" they said "Do you remember it?" And then the opera-goers closed their eyes ecstatically. "The season before was better, far better! Tschut!" And then they went on drinking their beer and liqueurs, and fanning themselves resignedly. "If the heat did not break before night-fall there would be a thunder-storm."
Viardot's triumphs is that of Ronconi, a name full of pleasant recollections, too, for many of the opera-goers of the last generation in the United States. There have been only a few lyric actors more versatile and gifted than he, or who have achieved their rank in the teeth of so many difficulties and disadvantages.
It won fame and cash for its composer in the old days when people went to the opera for lack of the music-hall, not yet invented; when Costa still lorded it not over living musical London merely, but over all the deceased masters, and without compunction added trombones to Mozart's scores, and defiled every masterwork he touched with his unspeakable Costamongery; when Wagner was either unheard of or regarded as a dangerous lunatic and immoral person; and it shows every sign of having been written to please the opera-goers of those days.
The two operas obtained the same number of performances, but Handel's theatre was seldom full, and many opera-goers were dissatisfied at his giving them oratorios, such as Deborah and Acis, on opera nights; these, however, seem to have been commanded by the King, and that in itself would make them all the more unpopular.
At the present moment there is hardly a musician in Paris who would not call him the greatest French composer he was a Belgian by birth, but what of that? of the nineteenth century. His fame was won in the concert-room rather than in the theatre, but the day may yet come when his 'Hulda' will be a familiar work to opera-goers.
This class of opera-goers never tire of abusing such singers as Fräulein Brandt and Herr Niemann because their voices are no longer as mellow as in their youth, and sometimes weaken in a sustained note or swerve for a second from the pitch.
It was not, after all, a new world, only newly arranged, like another scene in the same play. The actors, who came and went, were for the most part the acquaintances of the Washington winter, and the callers and diners and opera-goers and charity managers of the city.
In fact, there is something especially repellent in the Count's lustful pursuit of the bride of the man to whose intellectual resourcefulness he owed the successful outcome of his own wooing. It is, indeed, a fortunate thing for Mozart's music that so few opera-goers understand Italian nowadays.
an unprepared discord which must have pained the ears and grieved the hearts of the ordinary opera-goers and pedants when the opera was first given. This subject is used in connection with the notion of daylight as a nuisance to lovers in the subsequent conversation of Tristan and Isolda a notion which we shall examine presently.
But he introduced the thin edge of the wedge, and although even to the days of Jenny Lind singers were occasionally permitted to interpolate cadenzas of their own, the old tradition that an opera was merely an opportunity for the display of individual vanity was doomed. His tragic operas, which were the delight of opera-goers in the fifties and sixties, sound cold and thin to modern ears.
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