Mr. Edwards gives us more details: The bull-fight, according to the original design of the authors, was to be shown in the form of a tableau, occupying all the back of the stage with live chorus figures and "supers" in the front of the picture and painted figures behind them. Escamillo was to have been seen triumphing over the figure of the fallen bull, while the crowd of spectators overlooking the arena shouted vociferously the air of the Toreador. In a dark background (the back of the stage alone being illuminated) the figures of Carmen and Don José were to be seen. Charles Pigot tells us that Micaela's song was composed originally for _Griselidis_ (an opera for which Sardou supplied the book and which Bizet never completed). The score of _Carmen_ would be perfect without it. The story of the Habanera is related elsewhere in this volume (p. 27), and need not be repeated here. _Carmen_ originally contained a good deal of spoken dialogue, which is still to be heard at the Paris Opéra-Comique. Guiraud (not Godard, as Clara Louise Kellogg has it) wrote the music for the recitatives and it is with these that the work is usually performed in foreign theatres, including the Metropolitan Opera House. In some theatres, however, a bastard version, a combination of these two forms, is given. It is probable that Spaniards base their main objection to _Carmen_ on the idealization of a national type offered by the libretto. It is not likely that they object to the music. At any rate they have always found Italian, French, and German music pleasant to their ears and many Spanish composers have been less Spanish than Bizet, who after all, was a Jew, and something of an oriental himself! The dances and some of the entr'acte music, then, of this opera may be considered thoroughly Spanish. But Spanish or not there is no denying that Bizet succeeded in writing one of the most delightful of operas. When I first read Nietzsche's "The Case of Wagner" I was inclined to feel that the German in his rage against Wagner had put up the silliest of opponents against him in order to make his ex-hero more ridiculous. I do not feel that way today. I humbly subscribe to all of Nietzsche's outpourings: "This music seems to me to be perfect. It approaches lightly, nimbly, and with courtesy. It is amiable, it does not produce _sweat_. 'What is good is easy; everything divine runs with light feet'--the first proposition of my Æsthetics. This music is wicked, subtle, and fatalistic; it remains popular at the same time,--it has the subtlety of a race, not of an individual. It is rich. It is precise.... It has borrowed from Mérimée the logic in passion, the shortest route, _stern_ necessity. It possesses, above all, what belongs to the warm climate, the dryness of the air, its _limpidezza_.... This music is gay; but it has not a French or a German gaiety. Its gaiety is African; destiny hangs over it, its happiness is short, sudden, and without