the financial outcome was such as to suggest that Mr. Gye's attitude
toward opera at the Metropolitan was something like that which the
Germans describe as a cat walking about a dish of hot porridge.

At intervals bits of gossip reached New York by cable, but none of
them was of a comforting character. One week it was said to be the
exorbitance of Mme. Nilsson's demands which gave Mr. Gye pause, and
the next the difficulty of finding a tenor worthy of succeeding Signor
Campanini and capable of satisfying the captious, critical, and
fastidious people of New York. There were suspicions, too, that some
of the embarrassments which confronted Mr. Gye and the Metropolitan
directors were due to the machinations of that sly and persuasive old
dog, Colonel Mapleson. Nilsson had but one rival, and she was Mme.
Patti. Her Colonel Mapleson had secured; not only her, but, report said,
Scalchi, Tremelli, and Tamagno also. Mme. Scalchi had been a strong prop
of the first Metropolitan season, and Tremelli and Tamagno, though they
had not been heard in America, had names to conjure with. Tremelli never
came, and it was not until 1890, when Mr. Abbey was again in the traces
of an Italian opera manager, and was exploiting both Mme. Patti and Mme.
Albani, that Tamagno was heard in New York.

Failures of such magnitude as those of Mr. Gye in London, Colonel
Mapleson at the Academy of Music, and Mr. Abbey at the Metropolitan
Opera House, naturally set the beards of the wiseacres a-wagging.
Clearly the world of opera was out of joint and a prophet with a new
evangel seemed to be needed to set it right. In New York the efforts had
been made along old lines, but Mr. Gye had ventured on an experiment
which suggested the polyglot scheme which became the fixed policy of
the Metropolitan Opera House some ten years later. Along with the old
Italian list Mr. Gye gave some of Wagner's lyric dramas in German, and