While I was in Russia in the spring of 1901, Cui played to me a "dramatic scene," or one-act opera, entitled _A Feast in Time of Plague_. It proved to be a setting of a curious poem by Poushkin which he pretended to have translated from Wilson's "City of the Plague." Walsingham, a young English nobleman, dares to indulge in "impious orgies" during the visitation of the Great Plague. The songs of the revellers are interrupted at intervals by a funeral march, as the dead-cart goes its round to collect its victims. Cui has set Poushkin's poem word for word, consequently this little work is more closely modelled upon Dargomijsky's _The Stone Guest_ than any other of his operas. When I heard the work, I was under the impression that it was intended only as a dramatic cantata, but it was afterwards produced as an opera at the New Theatre, Moscow, in the autumn of 1901. The song sung by Walsingham's mistress, Mary ("Time was"), which is Scotch in character, has considerable pathetic charm, and struck me as the most spontaneous number in the work, which, on the whole, seems an effort to fit music not essentially tragic in character to a subject of the gloomiest nature. In summing up Cui's position as a composer, I must return to my assertion that it is paradoxical. First, we may conclude from the preponderance of operatic music and songs that Cui is more gifted as a vocal than as an instrumental composer; that, in fact, he needs a text to bring out his powers of psychological analysis. But when we come to examine his music, the methods--and even the mannerisms--of such instrumental composers as Chopin and Schumann are reflected in all directions. A style obviously founded on Schumann will necessarily lack the qualities which we are accustomed to regard as essential to a great operatic style. Cui has not the luminous breadth and powerful flow of simple and effective melody which we find in the older type of opera; nor the pre-eminent skill in declamation which is indispensable to the newer forms of music-drama. His continuous use of arioso becomes monotonous and ineffective, because, with him, the clear edges of melody and recitative seem perpetually blurred. This arises partly from the fact that Cui's melody, though delicate and refined, is not strongly individual. He is not a plagiarist in the worst sense of the word, but the influences which a stronger composer would have cast off at maturity seem to obtain a stronger hold on him as time goes on. His talent reminds me of those complex recipes for pot-pourri which we find in the day-books of our great-grandmothers. It is compounded of many more or less delightful ingredients: French predilections, Schumannesque mannerisms, some essence distilled from the grace and passion of Chopin, a dash of Russian sincerity--a number of fragrant and insidious aromas, in which the original element of individuality is smothered in the rose leaves and lavender winnowed from other people's gardens. Then there is