even ventured an English opera done into German--C. Villiers Stanford's
"Savonarola." Was Italian opera dead? So it almost seemed; but the
incidents attending its demise were familiar to operatic history and
as old as Italian opera in London and New York. When the art form was
making its first struggles for habilitation in the British metropolis
Addison thought the spectacle so amusing that he wrote an essay in
which he pictured the amazement of the next generation on learning that
in the days of its predecessors English men and women had sat out entire
evenings listening to an entertainment in a foreign tongue. And he said
in that essay many other excellent things, the truth and force of which
are just as deserving of appreciation (and just as needful) now as they
were in the time of the writer.

The consciousness of the absurdity of Italian opera transported in the
"original package" (to speak commercially) to England and America seems
to have been constant with the Anglo-Saxon peoples. Of this the legion
of managerial wrecks which strew the operatic shores or float as
derelicts bear witness. Bankers, manufacturers, and noblemen have come
to the rescue of ambitious managers, or become ambitious managers
themselves, only to go down in the common disaster. Mr. Delafield wrote
his name high among his fellows across the water by losing half a
million of dollars in a single season--a feat which no man equaled till
Mr. Abbey came. Taylor got himself into the King's Bench Prison by his
venturesomeness, and, once there, found consolation in a philosophy
which taught him that of all places in the world the properest one for
an opera manager was a prison. But I have mentioned this before.

Time was when the popular taste found complete satisfaction in the
melodies of the Italian composers. Time was when the desire for novelty
in the operatic field could be satisfied only by importations from