A composer who borrows from his former works deserves reproach as little as a person who removes his purse from one pocket into another which he thinks a better place. To borrow from the works of others, as some composers have done, is altogether a different thing. However, it would be unreasonable to regard such a plagiarism as a theft unless the plagiarist conceals the liberty he is taking by disguising the appropriation so as to make it appear a creation of his own. Some inferior musicians display much talent in this procedure. Our great composers, on the other hand, have often so wonderfully ennobled compositions of other musicians which they have thought advisable to admit into their oratorios, operas, or other elaborate works, that they have thereby honoured the original composers of those pieces as well as benefited art. It is a well-known fact that Handel has, in several of his oratorios, made use of the compositions of others. As these adoptions have been pointed out by one or two of Handel's biographers, it may suffice here to allude to them. Beethoven has adopted remarkably little. His employment of popular tunes where they are especially required, as for example in his Battle Symphony, Op. 91, can hardly be regarded as an instance to the contrary. At any rate, popular tunes have frequently been adopted by our great composers for the purpose of giving to a work a certain national character. Weber has done this very effectively in his 'Preciosa.' Gluck, in his 'Don Juan,' introduces the Spanish fandango. Mozart does the same in his 'Le Nozze di Figaro,' twenty-five years later. Here probably Mozart took a hint from Gluck. However this may be, there can be no doubt that Gluck's 'Don Juan' contains the germs of several beautiful phrases which occur in Mozart's 'Don Giovanni.' Even on this account it deserves to be better known to musicians than it is, independently of its intrinsic musical value. A detailed account of it here would, however, be a transgression. Suffice it to state that Gluck's 'Don Juan' is a ballet which was composed at Vienna in the year 1761, twenty-six years before Mozart produced his 'Don Giovanni.' The programme of the former work, which has been printed from a manuscript preserved in the BibliothËque de l'Ecole Royale de Musique of Paris, shows that it is nearly identical with the scenarium of the latter work. The instrumental pieces, of which there are thirty-one, are mostly short, and increase in beauty and powerful expression towards the end of the work. The justly-deserved popularity in Vienna of Gluck's 'Don Juan' probably induced Mozart to have his 'Don Giovanni' first performed under the title of 'Il Dissoluto Punito,' and the great superiority of this opera may perhaps be the cause of Gluck's charming production having fallen into obscurity.