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You love the smell of the sweet-fern and the bayberry-leaves, I don't doubt; but I hardly think that the last bewitches you with young memories as it does me. For the same reason I come back to damask roses, after having raised a good many of the rarer varieties. I like to go to operas and concerts, but there are queer little old homely sounds that are better than music to me.
The more highly cultivated, pure, sweet, and flexible the voice, the more the enjoyment derived. And is it not equally true that Wagner's style of music discourages singing of this sort, or, in fact, singing of any sort? Are not the principal features of Wagner's operas the orchestra, acting, and general mise-en-scène, and does not singing, pure and simple, have but little part in it?"
Another misconception regarding Chopin is that his latest works are morbid and unintelligible. The same charge was brought by philistines against the best works of Beethoven, Schumann, and Wagner. The fact is that these last works are of an almost matchless harmonic depth and originality, as superior to his earlier works as Wagner's last music dramas are to his first operas.
Faustus, and Goethe's tragedy calls for musical aid imperatively. A musical pantomime, "Harlequin Faustus," was performed in London as early as 1715, and there were Faust operas long before even the first part of Goethe's poem was printed, which was a hundred and one years ago. A composer named Phanty brought out an opera entitled "Dr.
Or she is brought up behind the scenes in some great Opera House of the world, where, all unnoticed by her elders, she lives in a dream world of her own, peopled by the various characters in the operas to which she daily listens. She watches the stage so closely and constantly that she unconsciously commits the rôles of the heroines she most admires, to memory.
In these eight years Handel presented to the public ten operas and five oratorios. It was in 1731 that the great significant fact, though unrecognized by himself and others, occurred, which stamped the true bent of his genius. This was the production of his first oratorio in England.
Olive, his wife, had attended an opera once and, according to her, it was more like a cat fight than anything else. Nobody but foreigners ever had anything to do with operas. And for foreigners of all kinds but the Latin variety of foreigner in particular Captain Zelotes Snow cherished a detest which was almost fanatic.
After that there was a revue of all the burlesques and comic operas, then the curtain was raised from the middle of the stage, and Nellie Farren was discovered seated at a table on a high stage with all the "legitimates" in frock-coats and walking dresses rising on benches around her. The set was a beautiful wood scene well lighted.
Thenceforward she sang at double prices, "notwithstanding the subscribers' privileges were on most of these occasions suspended, and although 'Otello, 'La Gazza Ladra, and operas of that description were the only ones offered to a public long since tired even of the beauties of Rossini, and proverbial for their love of novelty."
Her later operas, "Sofia" and "Eleonora d'Aborea," were as warmly received as her first attempt. Her work is by no means limited to the stage. She has produced an excellent mass, which was written for the cathedral of her native town.
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