This sort of music can never, in our lifetime at least, thank goodness, become popular with the British public. It may, as Dr. Johnson said of the violoncello performance, be wonderful, but we only wish it were impossible. Wagner's lyrical-dramatic music requires no operatic vocalists at all. Let there be a first-rate orchestra, a book of the plot in hands of the audience, and tableaux vivants or dissolving views to illustrate it--as illustration is still necessary for the illiterate. To ourselves, speaking as mere laics in the matter, with a fondness for tune, harmony, and good dramatic situations, it seems that singing and acting are thrown away on such vocal music and such tedious and unsavoury libretti. Richard Wagner's Operas will be remembered when the _Barbiere_ and a few more trifles are forgotten, but not till then. And then Wagner inconsiderately went and died a few months later, and _Punch_, who was never given to indulging in war-dances over his dead enemies, printed not exactly a palinode, but a liberal acknowledgment that this "arch-revolutionist" of the brood of "Demiurgus militant" was a considerable figure. Given his temperament and aims, _Punch_ asks:-- What wonder He brought the sword into mild Music's sphere, And in the clangour of the hurtling spear, The clashing mail, and the loud battle-thunder, Missed, sometime, of the finer harmony The still small voice, known of the subtler ear, Which outlives all War's clarions? Year on year May pass ere he is measured. Yet we see The work of a strong shaper, one whose part Was with new light to show a newer way. He stripped the gewgaw'd shams of Opera, Lord of two spheres, he wedded Art with Art, And Music, sunned in brighter, larger fame, May date its nobler dawn from Wagner's mighty name. [Sidenote: _"The Beggar's Opera" in 1878_] The splendid Indian summer of Verdi's genius which gave us _Aïda_, _Otello_ and _Falstaff_ is only partially recognized. When Aïda was produced in 1876 _Punch_ was more interested in Patti and Nicolini, the magnificence of the mounting and the chatter of the boxes, than in the music. In the _finale_ "the brass was everywhere, the voices nowhere." _Punch_ was happier in dealing with _Carmen_, in which Nietzsche, after he had abandoned Wagnerism, found the exemplification of his dictum "_il faut Méditerraniser la musique_," and which has won the allegiance of all schools. And it is interesting in view of the wonderful success recently achieved by the revival of _The Beggar's Opera_ to read _Punch's_ eulogies of Sims Reeves, when the famous tenor appeared at Covent Garden as Captain Macheath in 1878. But here again he is more interested in Sims Reeves's singing and acting than in the play or the music:--