_Franciscus_ was the first work to bring Edgar Tinel (1854-1912) international fame. While preceding works had brought him success, the sound musicianship of this oratorio, its beauties of contrapuntal and orchestral structure, won for its composer a wide recognition beyond the boundaries of his native Belgium as one of the ablest contemporary choral writers. He has written much church-music and has evinced strong interest in the reform of Gregorian chant and ecclesiastical music which has stirred the Roman Church since the middle of the nineteenth century. It was while he was director of the Institute for Sacred Music at Malines that he composed ‘Franciscus,’ generally regarded as his masterpiece, and it was produced there, August 22, 1888. It was one of the works performed at the Lower Rhine Festival in 1894 and was heard for the first time in England in 1895 at the Cardiff Festival. Before either German or English performance, however, it had been brought out in New York City in 1893. The librettist, Lodemijk de Koninck, has woven into the lines of his poem all the salient features of the life of St. Francis of Assisi (1181-1226), ‘the adorable mediæval mystic who invited all beings and all things to divine love,’ and who became the founder of the great mendicant order of Franciscan monks. The oratorio is divided into three parts. The first--‘Francis’ Worldly Life and his Renunciation’--opens with a sonorous prelude developed from a theme of stately character and discloses a brilliant scene of court life at Assisi, where knights and ladies hold high feast amid the beauty of an Italian night. There is dancing and merriment and the gay Francis is called upon for a song. He astonishes the guests by singing the Ballad of Poverty, which, with its quaint unaccompanied choral refrains, forms one of the most delightful musical passages in the work. On his way home after the festivities he hears a voice speaking his name. Later in his chamber he hears the same heavenly voice and sees a vision of a magnificent hall, hung with cross-bedecked armor, wherein a noble maiden, Poverty, walks. The heavenly voice tells him that Poverty shall be his bride, his weapon the cross, and his mission to convert the world. The second part pictures ‘Francis’ Monastic Life’ and teems with the fantastic episodes with which mediæval legends allegorically associated the lives of the church fathers and saints. It introduces the angels of Hope, of Love, and of Peace, against whom the spirits of War and of Hate wage battle. Francis, worn with fasting, bare-foot and clad in a monk’s gray garb, comes from his cell. His former companions no longer know him, and jeer him as he tells them of his lovely bride, Poverty. He sings the beautiful, pathetic Song of Poverty, _Erbarm’ Dich meiner Noth, O Herr!_ (‘Have mercy on my need, O Lord!’). Taught by him they learn the meaning of brotherly love and peace reigns on earth. Francis’