and Fricka in “Das Rheingold” and similar passages in the succeeding dramas are essentially scenes to be read rather than acted.) One would suppose that Wagner had made impossible any repetition of the old operatic incongruities. Quite the contrary is the case. One of the latest Italian operas is, if anything, more absurd than any of its predecessors. What could be more grotesque than an opera whose scene is in a mining camp in the West, whose characters include a gambler, a sheriff, a woman of the camp, and so forth, whose language is perforce very much in the vernacular, whose plot hinges on a game of cards,--an “Outcast-of-Poker-Flat” opera,--and this translated, for the benefit of the composer, into Italian and produced in that language? “I’m dead gone on you, Minnie,” says Rance; “_Ti voglio bene, Minnie_,” sings his Italian counterpart. “Rigoletto” does entrance us by the beauty and the sincerity of its melodies; it is what it pretends to be; it deals with emotions which we can share because they derive ultimately from great human issues. The Count, Magdalina, Rigoletto, and Gilda are all types; we know them well in literature--in poetry, novel, and drama; they are valid. We accept the strained convention of the scene as being inevitable at that point in the development of the opera. But after Wagner’s reforms, and the influence they exerted on Verdi himself, the greatest of the Italians, it would seem incredible that any composer could lapse into a “Girl of the Golden West.” Nearly all Puccini’s operas are a reversion to type. The old-fashioned lurid melodrama appears again, blood-red as usual; as in “La Tosca,” which leaves almost nothing to the imagination--one specially wishes that it did in certain scenes. “Local color,” so-called, appears again in all its arid deception--as in the Japanese effects in the music of “Madame Butterfly”; again we hear the specious melody pretending to be real, with its octaves in the orchestra to give it a sham intensity. It is the old operatic world all over again. When we compare any tragic scene in Puccini’s operas with the last act of Verdi’s “Otello,” we realize the vast difference between the two. It is true that Puccini gives us beautiful lyric moments--as when Mimi, in “La Bohème,” tells Rudolph who she is; it is true, also, that we ought not to cavil because Puccini is not as great a composer as Verdi. Our comparison is not for the purpose of decrying one at the expense of the other, but to point out that the greater opera is not called for by the public and the lesser is; that we get “La Bohème,” “Madame Butterfly,” and “La Tosca” twenty times to “Otello’s” once, and that we thereby lose all sense of operatic values.