desert--in which the music is excellent. As to these numbers which are special favourites with the public, as is so frequently the case, their real value proves to be in inverse ratio to the success they have won." Some idea of the popularity of _Rogneda_ may be gathered from the fact that the tickets were subscribed for twenty representations in advance. This success was followed by a pause in Serov's literary and musical activity. He could now speak with his enemies in the gate, and point triumphantly to the children of his imagination. Success, too, seems to have softened his hostility to the national school, for in 1866 he delivered some lectures before the Musical Society upon Glinka and Dargomijsky, which are remarkable not only for clearness of exposition, but for fairness of judgment. In 1867 Serov began to consider the production of a third opera, and selected one of Ostrovsky's plays on which he founded a libretto entitled _The Power of Evil_. Two quotations from letters written about this time reveal his intention with regard to the new opera. "Ten years ago," he says, "I wrote much about Wagner. Now it is time to act. To embody the Wagnerian theories in a music-drama written in Russian, on a Russian subject." And again: "In this work, besides observing as far as possible the principles of dramatic truth, I aim at keeping more closely than has yet been done to the forms of Russian popular music, as preserved unchanged in our folk-songs. It is clear that this demands a style which has nothing in common with the ordinary operatic forms, nor even with my two former operas." Here we have Serov's programme very clearly put before us: the sowing of Wagnerian theories in Russian soil. But in order that the acclimatisation may be complete, he adopts the forms of the folk-songs. He is seeking, in fact, to fuse Glinka and Wagner, and produce a Russian music-drama. Serov was a connoisseur of the Russian folk-songs, but he had not that natural gift for assimilating the national spirit and breathing it back into the dry bones of musical form as Glinka did. In creating this Russo-Wagnerian work, Serov created something purely artificial: a hybrid, which could bring forth nothing in its turn. It is characteristic, too, of Serov's short-sighted egotism that we find him constantly referring to this experiment of basing an opera upon the forms of the national music as a purely original idea; ignoring the fact that Glinka, Dargomijsky and Moussorgsky had all produced similar works, and that the latter had undoubtedly written "music-dramas," which, though not strictly upon Wagnerian lines, were better suited to the genius of the nation.