In 1892 I gave the first performance in America of Saint-Saëns’s opera of “Samson and Delilah.” This work is admirably adapted for concert performance, and many portions of it are far more effective in this form than on the stage. The music is lovely and of great melodic simplicity, and many of the choruses are written in oratorio form. At stage performances the dramatic climax of the second act, in which _Delilah_ appears jubilantly at the door of her palace, shaking _Samson’s_ red wig triumphantly at the admiring high priest and soldiers, is really an anticlimax, and excites our risibilities much more than our sorrow that the God-given strength of the mighty soldier has left him. From my father I have inherited a deep admiration for Hector Berlioz and have conducted many performances of his greater works—the “Damnation of Faust,” the “Requiem Mass,” “Romeo and Juliet,” and the first rendition in America of his “Te Deum.” Another novelty which I produced with the Oratorio Society in 1889 was the “Missa Solemnis” of Edward Grell. This work created a sensation. Its composer was virtually unknown except locally in Berlin, where he had been a teacher of counterpoint and composition in the first half of the nineteenth century. He had lived himself so completely into the style of the Italian masters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that modern harmonies simply did not exist for him, and his “Missa Solemnis” is conceived absolutely in the manner of the early masters of ecclesiastical music. It is written for four choruses of four parts each and four solo quartets. There is absolutely no accompaniment, and the purity of these sixteen-part harmonies without any admixture of instruments produces truly celestial effects. The four choruses which are generally used antiphonally with the solo quartets, produce thrilling climaxes, and the _Benedictus_ especially gives an impression of ecstatic beauty. I have written elsewhere, of my first performance of the “Christus,” by Liszt. I also produced “St. Christopher,” by Horatio Parker, distinguished American musician and composer. This work, however, did not prove as effective as his “Hora Novissima.” It seemed to fall between two stools, as it was neither an opera nor an oratorio.