We might like to see works spring from the author"s brain as complete as Minerva was when she sprang from Jove"s, but that is infrequently the case. When we study the long series of operas which Gluck wrote, we are surprised to meet some things which we recognize as having seen before in the masterpieces which immortalize his name. And often the Mp3 Music is adapted to entirely different situations in the changed form. The words of a follower become the awesome prophecy of a high priest. The trio in _Orphee_ with its tender love and expressions of perfect happiness fairly trembles with accents of sorrow. The Mp3 Music had been written for an entirely different situation which justified them. Massenet has told us that he borrowed right and left from his unpublished score, _La Coupe du Roi de Thule_. That is what Gluck did with his _Elena e Paride_ which had little success. I may as well confess that one of the ballets in _Henry VIII_ came from the finale of an opera-comique in one act. This work was finished and ready to go to rehearsal when the whole thing was stopped because I had the audacity to assert to Nestor Roqueplan, the director of Favart Hall, that Mozart"s _Le Nozze di Figaro_ was a masterpiece.

However, it must be confessed that this effect does not come up to expectations. In a church or a concert hall we hear a confused and terrifying mingling of sounds, and from time to time we note a change in the depth of tone but we are unable to distinguish the pitch of the chords.

But that wasn"t enough for me, and to overcome the obstacles, I caused a scandal. At the age of twenty-eight I competed for the _Prix de Rome_! They did not give it to me on the ground that I didn"t need it, but the day after the award, Auber, who was very fond of me, asked Carvalho for a libretto for me. Carvalho gave me _Le Timbre d"Argent_, which he didn"t know what to do with as several Mp3 Musicians had refused to touch it. There were good reasons for this, for, despite an excellent foundation for the Mp3 Music, the libretto had serious faults. I demanded that Barbier and Carre, the authors, should make important changes, which they did at once. Then, I retired to the heights of Louveciennes and in two months wrote the score of the five acts which the work had at first.

_Le Prophete_ was enormously successful in spite of the then powerful censer-bearers of the Italian school. We now see its defects rather than its merits. Meyerbeer is criticised for not putting into practice theories he did not know and no account is taken of his fearlessness, which was great for that period. No one else could have drawn the cathedral scene with such breadth of stroke and extraordinary brilliancy. The paraphrase of _Domine salvum fac regem_ reveals great ingenuity. His method of treating the organ is wonderful, and his idea of the ritournello _Sur le Jeu de hautbois_ is charming. This precedes and introduces the children"s chorus, and is constructed on a novel theme which is developed brilliantly by the choruses, the orchestra and the organ combined. The repetition of the _Domine Salvum_ at the end of the scene, which bursts forth abruptly in a different key, is full of color and character.

It is true that Massenet was not profound, but that is of little consequence. Just as there are many mansions in our Father"s house, so there are many in Apollo"s. Art is vast. The artist has a perfect right to descend to the nethermost depths and to enter into the inner secrets of the soul, but this right is not a duty.

The choice finally fell on Blum. He had a fine voice, and was a perfect singer but no actor. Indeed he said he didn"t want to be an actor; his ideal was to appear in white gloves. Each day brought new bickerings. They made cuts despite my wishes; they left me at the mercy of the insubordination and rudeness of the stage manager and the ballet master, who would not listen to my most modest suggestions. I had to pay the cost of extra Mp3 Musicians in the wings myself. Some stage settings which I wanted for the prologue were declared impossible–I have seen them since in the _Tales of Hoffman_.

It is not worth while telling how the Tsar took lessons on the flute from a young pastry cook who came on the stage with a basket of cakes on his head; how the cook later became a lord, and many other details of this absurd play. It is permitted to be absurd on the stage, if it is done so that the absurdity is forgotten. But in this instance it was impossible to forget the absurdities. The extravagance of the libretto led the Mp3 Musician into many unfortunate things. This extremely interesting score is very uneven, but there are a thousand details worth the attention of the professional Mp3 Musician. Beauty even appears in the score at moments, and there are charming and picturesque bits, as well as puerilities and shocking vulgarities.

Delsarte, handsome, eloquent, and fascinating, wielded an almost imperial sway over his little coterie of artists. Thanks to him the lamp of our old French school was kept dimly burning until the day when inherent justice permitted it to be revived. In this restricted world no evening was complete without Delsarte. He would come in with some story of frightful throat trouble to justify his chronic lack of voice, and, then, without any voice at all but by a kind of magic, would put shudders into the tones of Orpheus or Eurydice. I often played his accompaniments and he always demanded _pianissimo_.

The beautiful 'progression' of the exorcism in the fourth act of _Le Prophete_ was not accepted without some difficulty. I can still see Gounod seated at a piano singing the debated passage and trying to convince a group of recalcitrant listeners of its beauty.

To-day Liszt"s _Credo_ is received with wild applause–Victor Hugo did his part-while Cherubini"s is never revived.