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 the rise of the first curtain, an absurd situation for a tenor air in opera, as it is a convention for opera-goers not to put in an appearance until the second act is well begun. Celeste Aida, therefore, in Oscarian opera was to be sung some time during the second or third act. He also had under consideration a rearrangement of La Forza del Destino, which he acknowledged was full of pretty tunes but which was handicapped by a preposterous fable, and he reminded me that when he had produced Les Huguenots he had imported from his own Victoria Theatre of Varieties a wire walker who simply transported the public as he threaded his way back and forth on the taut steel during the scene laid in a meadow on the bank of the Seine, thereby diverting attention from the "dull music," how Mary Garden, inserted in the tenor rôle of Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame, had made that opera a desirable form of entertainment, and again, how Odette Valery, plus live vipers and boa constrictors, had almost succeeded in making Samson et Dalila endurable.

The idea allured me, and seemed, at first thought, novel. As opera is seldom regarded seriously by musicians, there is no reason why it should be so solemnly conducted. There are times at the Metropolitan Opera House when one expects to hear the gong of high mass sound or Professor William Lyon Phelps begin to lec-