the solo airs; and this is of great advantage to the musical construction. The definite and prearranged progress of the action fulfils all the conditions of operatic representation with regard to the position and diversity of the musical pieces; the poetical conceptions are clever and appropriate, a suggestion of Beaumarchais being often amplified in the musical working-out. The French comedy was of wonderful advantage in maintaining the dialogue; and, shortened and modified as it was of necessity, it retained far more of the spirit and life of the original than was usual in the recitatives of opera buffa. This is not indeed the case as far as the German adaptations of the opera are concerned. I am not aware whence proceeded the first translation made use of in Berlin in 1790.[5] In 1791 Knigge adapted the opera for Schroder in Hamburg;[6] in 1792 it was given in Vienna, translated by Gieseke; and in 1794 Vulpius's translation appeared. A new translation, giving not only Da Ponte's verses, but Mozart's improvements on them, is a pressing necessity. The vast superiority of "Le Nozze di Figaro," in characterisation, plot, and dialogue, to the very best of opera buffa libretti may be easily discerned by comparing it with other famous operas, such as Casti's "Re Teodoro" or "Grotta di Trofonio." In many essential points "Figaro" overstepped the limits of opera buffa proper, and brought to view entirely new elements of dramatic construction. The political element indeed, on which perhaps most of the effect of the comedy depended, was altogether omitted from the opera. Not only does the dialogue receive its essential character from the satire and scorn which it freely casts upon the abuses of political and social life--the whole tendency of the play is to depict the nobleman of the period, who, himself without truth and honour, demands both from others, indulges his lust without scruple, and thereby causes his dependents, injured in their moral rights, to turn against him their intellectual superiority, so that he is finally {DA PONTE'S LIBRETTO.} (79) worsted and disgraced. This conception of the nobility and their position in relation to the citizen class is expressed with energy and malice, and found such a response in the prevailing opinions of the time, that the production of the piece against the expressed will of the King appeared to be a public confirmation of the principles which inspired it; and Napoleon might with justice say of "Figaro": "C'était la révolution déjà en action."[7] Every trace of these feelings has vanished in the opera, as will be clearly perceived by a comparison of the celebrated "Frondeur-monologue" of Figaro in the fifth act with the jealous song in the opera. The omission was made not so much in deference to the Emperor Joseph's scruples as with the right conviction that the political element is altogether out of place in music.