Wagner’s reforms were bound to bring about a reaction, which came in due season and resulted in shorter and more direct works, such as those of the modern Italians. No operas since Wagner, save Verdi’s “Otello” and “Falstaff,” approach the greatness of his music-dramas, and the tendency of many of these later works has been too much toward what we mildly call “decadence.” But there is a great difference between the truthfulness and artistic validity of “Carmen” and that of “La Bohème” and “La Tosca.” The former is packed full of genuine passion, however primitive, brutal, and devastating it may be; and its technical skill is undoubted. The most interesting phrase of modern opera is found in the works of the Russians. It was inevitable that they should overturn our delicately adjusted artistic mechanism. Dostoïevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov” is as though there never had been a Meredith or a Henry James, and Moussorgsky’s “Boris Godounov” is as though there had never been a Mozart or a Wagner. It has something of that amorphous quality which seems to be a part of Russian life, but, on the other hand, it has immense vitality. How refreshing to see a crowd of peasants look like peasants, and to hear them sing their own peasant songs; and what stability they give to the whole work! “Boris Godounov” gravitates, as it were, around these folk-songs, which give to it a certain reality and truthfulness. V. OPERA AS A HUMAN INSTITUTION These various works have long since been accepted by the musical world as the great masterpieces in operatic form. Many of them are practically out of the present repertoire of our opera houses. Were we to assert ourselves--were the general public given an opportunity to choose between good and bad--we should hear them often. And who shall say what results might not come from a small and properly managed opera house, with performances of fine works at reasonable prices? Opera is controlled by a few rich men who think it a part of the life of a great city that there should be an opera house with a fine orchestra, fine scenery, and the greatest singers obtainable. It does not exist for the good of the whole city, but rather for those of plethoric purses. It does not make any attempt to become a sociological force; it does not even dimly see what possibilities it possesses in that direction. Opera houses and opera companies are sedulously protected against any sociological scrutiny. They are persistently reported to be hot-beds of intrigue; they trade on society and on the love of highly paid singing; they surround themselves with an exotic atmosphere in which the normal person finds difficulty in breathing, and which often turns the opera singer into a strange specimen of the _genus_ man or woman; they go to ruin about once in so often, and are extricated by the unnecessarily rich; they are too little related to the community that supports them save in the mediums of money and social convention.