Questions will naturally arise as to the power of these songs to stand comparison with the lyrics of the later Frenchmen. Reynaldo Hahn, for example, also toys with the rarefied method, and paints delicate impressionistic tone pictures. These are not ordinary songs, but they will not bear the chilling spaces of the concert room. They are for the salon, for the intimate communication of one at the piano to another sitting beside it. With a cigarette, a glass of Madeira (very mellow), lights half down, as stage directions say, and a woman with whom you are not too much in love singing to you in the point-lace wilderness, the songs of Reynaldo Hahn will make of you an Omar Khayyam transformed into what Mr. Kipling calls "a demnition product." If the woman is beautiful, the Madeira soothing, and the cigarette mild, you will be ready to swear that Hahn is the Schubert of the Boulevards. But if some one sings Hahn to you as No. 4 on an afternoon programme in a rectangular recital hall, you will vote the dainty French writer the essence of puerility. Another of these very precious gentlemen who has come into notice is Alexandre Georges. Did you ever chance to hear his "Chansons de Miarka," settings of texts of Jean Richepin's "Miarka, the Bear's Foundling"? They are worth a hearing. The poems--consider such titles as "Nuages," "La Poussière," "La Pluie," "La Parole"--are mood pictures and invite musical treatment. The composer has done well with them. He has done nothing new, to be sure, but he has made himself comfortable in the well-kept museum of the obvious. He has trotted in old-fashioned rhythm with the Romany, and he has rained a glittering torrent of sixteenth notes along the upper steppes of the keyboard. But what can we ask? A Frenchman must not be disrespectful of the vogue. These songs have atmosphere, and if it is painted in familiar and safe tints, who shall blame a man for assuring himself of correct methods? The declamation is generally clear and fluent, and the moods of the poems are reproduced in the music with propriety and elegance. But this is wandering. The point to be made--not a very important one, perhaps--is that all these moderns, with Strauss, their best man, in the lead, are experimenting. They are testing the power of lyric composition to do without the poetic basis of metre. Without metre they are compelled to develop their melodies by a new process, and they seem likely to fall into the error of losing definite musical figuration altogether. They declaim and recite. Their accompaniments are miniature symphonic descriptions. Yet it has all been done before. The two Schubert songs already named, and "Die Allmacht" ought to show these gentlemen how to do what they seem to be trying so hard to do without quite accomplishing their ends. AUX ITALIENS I.--ITALIAN OPERA OF TO-DAY What do ye singing? What is this ye sing?