At the last rehearsal of one of these operas Rubinstein was so well pleased with the work of the orchestra that he turned to them and said: “Gentlemen, if my opera is a success you must all come to my hotel after the performance for a champagne supper.” Unfortunately, the opera was a decided frost and the audience so undemonstrative that Rubinstein, in absolute disgust, laid down the stick after the second act, and, bidding the local conductor finish the opera, returned dejectedly to his hotel and went to bed. At eleven o’clock there was a knock at his door. “Who is it?” he shouted in great irritation. “It is I, Herr Rubinstein, the double-bass player from the opera orchestra.” “What do you want?” “I have come for the champagne supper.” “What nonsense!” raged Rubinstein. “The opera was a ghastly failure.” “Well, Herr Rubinstein,” answered the thirsty and undaunted double-bass player, “_I_ liked it!” The disappearance of Schumann’s symphonies from concert programmes is due to the fact that he was never at ease in writing for the orchestra. His instrumentation is so thick and turgid as to be the despair of conductors. So much of the music is exquisite, but it is like a precious jewel imbedded in a foreign substance which conductors try in vain to remove by changing the dynamics of this or that instrument, or by leaving out an unnecessary doubling up of certain harmonies. All these devices, however, can do but little. More heroic measures are necessary, and I was much interested last summer when Sir Edward Elgar asked me what I would think of his deliberately reorchestrating an entire symphony of Schumann’s. I heartily applauded such an idea and begged him to carry it out speedily as there is perhaps no one living to-day who better understands the colors of the orchestra and knows how to produce the most subtle shades in the intermingling of the different instruments. In the meantime Frederick Stock, the noted conductor of the Chicago Orchestra, has taken the bull by the horns and has written a new orchestration of Schumann’s “Rhenish Symphony” which I hope to produce this winter. Are Sousa’s marches played nowadays? They should be. They are better than the military marches of Europe of to-day, and while one cannot put them into the category of higher musical efforts they are the only American compositions of musical worth that have triumphantly blazed their way all over the world.