music seventy-five years ago!—to him tones were definite ideas, not merely vibrations that agitate nervous centres. Music alone has the power of restoring us to ourselves, while other arts give us defined pleasures. Mahomet is a trilogy, the libretto by Gambara himself—mark this familiar detail. It contained The Martyrs, Mahomet, and Jerusalem Delivered,—the God of the West, the God of the East, and the struggles of religions around a tomb. In this immense frame, philosophy, patriotism, racial antagonisms, love, the magic of ancient Sabianism and Oriental poetry of the Jewish—culminating in the Arabian—are all displayed. As Gambara says, “Ah! to be a great musician, it is necessary also to be very learned. Without knowledge, no local color, no ideas in the music.” This irresistibly reminds one of a phrase from Wagner’s notebook. The story of the opera—too long to set down here—as told by Gambara, is wonderful. It has the ring of an analytical programme to some new-fangled and heretical symphonic poem. Here is the curious medley of psychology, musical references, history, stage directions, cries of hysteria, and much clotted egotism. There is the clash of character, the shock of events; and it is well to note such a phrase as this: “The dark and gloomy color of this finale [Act I] is varied by the motives of the three women who predict to Mahomet his triumph, and whose phrases will be found developed in the third act, in the scene where Mahomet tastes the delights of his grandeur.” Does this not forestall Wagner’s Ring? or did Balzac really find the entire idea in Hoffmann’s Kater Murr? Is not Kapellmeister Kreisler the first of his line? Now, while there seems to be far too much praying in this drama of soul and action, it is not such a farrago as it appears at first reading. I imagine that Balzac knew little of the technics of music; yet he guessed matters with astonishing perspicacity. His characterization of the megalomaniacal Mahomet, and his epileptic grandeurs would do as a portrait of most founders of new religions. Balzac had Voltaire to draw upon; but he makes the epilepsy a big motive in Mahomet’s life,—as it is in the lives of the majority of religious geniuses and fanatics, from Buddha to the newest faith-curing healer. And how was this extraordinary music and libretto received by Gambara’s wife, her admirer, and the Italian cook? “There was not the appearance of a poetical or musical idea in the stunning cacophony which smote the ears: the principles of harmony, the first rules of composition, were totally foreign to this shapeless creation. Instead of music, learnedly connected, which Gambara described, his fingers produced a succession of fifths, sevenths, octaves, major thirds, and steps from fourth without sixth to the bass, a combination of discordant sounds thrown at hazard which seemed to combine to torture the least delicate ear.” I am positive, nevertheless, that it must have been great, wonderful, new music.