generally omitted in performance. Adam, to judge by the record in
Holy Writ, made an uneventful end: "And all the days that Adam
lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died"; but this
did not prevent Lesueur from writing an opera on his death ten
years after Haydn's oratorio had its first performance. He called
it "La Mort d'Adam et son Apotheose," and it involved him in a
disastrous quarrel with the directors of the Conservatoire and the
Academie. Pursuing the search chronologically, the librettists next
came upon Cain and Abel, who offered a more fruitful subject for
dramatic and musical invention. We know very little about the
sacred operas whieh shared the list with works based on classical
fables and Roman history in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries; inasmuch, however, as they were an outgrowth of the
pious plays of the Middle Ages and designed for edifying
consumption in Lent, it is likely that they adhered in their plots
pretty close to the Biblical accounts. I doubt if the sentimental
element which was in vogue when Rossini wrote "Mose in Egitto"
played much of a role in such an opera as Johann Philipp Fortsch's
"Kain und Abel; oder der verzweifelnde Brudermorder," which was
performed in Hamburg in 1689, or even in "Abel's Tod," which came
along in 1771. The first fratricidal murder seems to have had an
early and an enduring fascination for dramatic poets and composers.
Metastasio's "La Morte d'Abele," set by both Caldara and Leo in
1732, remained a stalking-horse for composers down to Morlacchi in
1820. One of the latest of Biblical operas is the "Kain" of
Heinrich Bulthaupt and Eugen d'Albert. This opera and a later lyric
drama by the same composer, "Tote Augen" (under which title a
casual reader would never suspect that a Biblical subject was
lurking), call for a little attention because of their indication
of a possible drift which future dramatists may follow in treating