Mefistofele by Arrigo Boïto to was revived at the Metropolitan Opera House, January 14, 1901, where it was originally heard in December, 1883, and later, January 15, 1896. There is a record that Marie Roze was the first Marguerite of Boïto at the Academy of Music. This was as early as November 24, 1880. Mefistofele was first heard in Milan, Italy, in 1868: its _première_ was a scene of rioting, and a duel in which Boïto participated occurred later. Public feeling ran very high, for they take their art seriously in Italy. The performance lasted six hours, and was a hopeless failure. Not until the work, pruned, revised, and greatly curtailed, was repeated in Bologna, did Boïto receive a fair hearing. He had composed little previous to this music-drama, preferring journalism and literary work. But Mefistofele was such a challenge to older operatic forms that the work was soon sung in London and elsewhere. Boïto, who is chiefly known as the librettist of the later Verdi, is a man of the highest artistic ideals. His mother was Polish, which may account for his versatility, his poetic gifts. He worked over, re-orchestrated, and polished Mefistofele, and changed Faust from a tenor to a barytone part. And it all smells of the lamp, despite some beautiful pages. Mefistofele was once music of the future; now it reminds one of some strange, amorphous survival from a remote period. It is such a tremendous attempt to embrace all of Goethe’s profound world philosophy, poetry, dramatic symbolism, that it is a failure—a remarkable failure. There is little melodic invention, the prison scene being the top notch of its dramatic passion; while the tenor solo, From the Meadows, From the Valleys, is strangely reminiscent of the theme from the slow movement of Beethoven’s Kreutzer sonata. It is mostly music of the head, not of the heart. Boïto has admirably characterized Mefistofele. His sinister solo, I am the Spirit that Denies, is very striking; the orchestra with its shrill, diabolical whistling suggests Berlioz. And it also suggests in feeling the Honor solo in Verdi’s Falstaff and Iago’s Credo in Otello. Boïto and Verdi have collaborated so much that they must have absorbed each other’s ideas. In the garden scene—a quartet and nothing more—Rigoletto is recalled in the echoing laughter. It seems trifling though trickily difficult. Goethe’s Marguerite is not realized. She is hardly ingénue, this flirting girl who so calmly gives a sleeping potion to her mother. And the loving side of her nature is barely outlined.