Oscar Hammerstein, for instance, through his Manhattan Opera Company, introduced the then new German and French operas to New York. This was early in our century, and though his project was short-lived, operatic institutions, all different in complexion, were springing up in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco. In the South, in New Orleans, French opera was still in existence. In the United States as in Europe the most celebrated melodies of Verdi, Donizetti, Gounod, Bizet, and even Wagner were played and sung. Why then, one will ask, did opera fail to become popular? The question is not of opera but of music drama, and has nothing to do with either the dramatic quality of the performances or with melodies. The author treasures the memory of certainly first-class performances of _Otello_, _Die Meistersinger_, _Carmen_, _Pelléas_, even of _Don Giovanni_ and of Gluck’s _Orpheus_. However, certainly for most devotees opera meant something other than music drama; and this for reasons ultimately deriving from the fact that opera in the United States was still a luxury article, imported without regard for its true purpose or its true nature, and that the circumstances of its production accentuated that fact. For a public with this orientation, opera possessed the magic of an emanation from a distant and glamorous world, one which retained the element of mystery. Since the artists were highly paid--as a result of a quite natural desire to have the very best available at any price--it was equally natural that the public overestimated the importance of individual singers and their voices, and remained comparatively unaware of the importance of ensemble. The “star system” did not originate in the United States, to be sure, but it found fertile soil here, as did the widespread idea of opera as a masquerade concert, a romantic pageant in which various celebrities played their roles, and the primary purpose of which was to provide sumptuous entertainment. Such an idea of opera was in part also the result of the fact that the works were sung in their original languages, or at times in other non-English languages. The idea was prevalent that English was a bad language to sing--and such an idea is not unnatural when it is considered that the singers were mainly of German, French, or Italian origin, background, or training. There were occasions on which singers sang different languages in the same performance: Chaliapin, for instance, sang _Boris Godunoff_ in Russian, supported by an Italian cast.