Outside the Metropolitan there was a season of German opera at the Thalia Theatre in 1887, the prima donna being Frau Herbert-Förster, the wife of Victor Herbert. The list of operas offered was commonplace. In 1888 the National Opera Company, without Theodore Thomas but with a distinguished tenor in Barton McGuckin, gave a short and unsuccessful season at the Academy of Music. A notable event of the same year was the first performance in America of Verdi's _Otello_ by a company brought from Italy by Italo Campanini. The enterprise failed, partly owing to the incompetence of the tenor, Marconi, who was cast for the title rôle, and partly owing to the fact that New Yorkers, for some peculiar reason, seem constitutionally incapable of appreciating Verdi in his greatest and least conventional works. Eva Tetrazzini, sister of the more famous Luisa, was the Desdemona of the occasion. The only performance of Italian opera in New York during the season of 1888-89 was a benefit for Italo Campanini at which he appeared with Clémentine de Vère in _Lucia di Lammermoor_. During the season of 1889-90 some performances of opera in English were given by the Emma Juch Opera Company at Oscar Hammerstein's Harlem Opera House, which was also the scene of a short postlude to the Metropolitan season by a company conducted by Walter Damrosch and including Lilli Lehmann. The Metropolitan in the meantime was occupied by a very strong Italian company under the management of Henry E. Abbey and Maurice Grau. The company included Patti, Albani, Nordica, and Tamagno,[50] with Arditi and Romualdo Sapio as conductors. Tamagno's presence meant, of course, the production of _Otello_, and this was the only interesting feature of the repertory. Patti was still singing a 'farewell' in the old hurdy-gurdy list. The season of 1890-91 proved to be the end of German opera at the Metropolitan for some years. _Der fliegende Holländer_, _Tannhäuser_, _Lohengrin_, the _Ring_ operas (except _Das Rheingold_), _Tristan und Isolde_, and _Die Meistersinger_, Beethoven's _Fidelio_, Cornelius's _Der Barbier von Bagdad_, Bizet's _Carmen_, and Meyerbeer's _Le Prophète_, _Les Huguenots_, and _L'Africaine_ were chosen from the regular repertory, while the novelties were Alberto Franchetti's _Asraël_, Anton Smareglia's _Der Vasall von Szigeth_, and _Diana von Solange_ by His Royal Highness Ernest II, duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. The two first-named novelties were of slight account, while the last-named was so trivial as to lend color to the innuendos that the justly famed liberality of His Royal Highness in the matter of decorations was being exercised for the benefit of some persons not unknown at the Metropolitan. V