made, the parts distributed to the orchestra, and Mr. Van Rooy sang Wolfram’s air before Wotan’s. It may be said that never could he have hoped for a more complete ovation, a more flattering reception than that which the Parisian audience accorded him when he had finished. The applause was veritably deafening. I have related elsewhere at some length my experiences at the first Paris performance of Igor Strawinsky’s ballet, _The Sacrifice to the Spring_, an appeal to primitive emotion through a nerve-shattering use of rhythm, staged in ultra-modern style by Waslav Nijinsky. Chords and legs seemed disjointed. Flying arms synchronized marvellously with screaming clarinets. But this first audience would not permit the composer to be heard. Cat-calls and hisses succeeded the playing of the first few bars, and then ensued a battery of screams, countered by a foil of applause. We warred over art (some of us thought it was and some thought it wasn’t). The opposition was bettered at times; at any rate it was a more thrilling battle than Strauss conceived between the Hero and his enemies in _Heldenleben_ and the celebrated scenes from _Die Meistersinger_ and _The Rape of the Lock_ could not stand the comparison. Some forty of the protestants were forced out of the theatre but that did not quell the disturbance. The lights in the auditorium were fully turned on but the noise continued and I remember Mlle. Piltz executing her strange dance of religious hysteria on a stage dimmed by the blazing light in the auditorium, seemingly to the accompaniment of the disjointed ravings of a mob of angry men and women. Little by little, at subsequent performances of the work the audiences became more mannerly, and when it was given in concert in Paris the following year it was received with applause. Some of my readers may remember the demonstration directed (supposedly) against American singers when the Metropolitan Opera Company invaded Paris some years ago for a spring season. The opening opera was _Aïda_, and all went well until the first scene of the second act, in which the reclining Amneris chants her thoughts while her slaves dance. Here the audience began to give signs of disapproval, which presently broke out into open hissing, and finally into a real hullabaloo. Mme. Homer, nothing daunted, continued to sing. She afterwards told me that she had never sung with such force and intensity. And in a few moments she broke the spell, and calmed the riot.