Jules Massenet is the author of many operas, of which mention may be made of _Le Roi de Lahore_, _Hérodiade_, _Manon_, _Le Cid_, _Esclarmonde_, _Werther_, _Thaïs_, _La Navarraise_, and _Le Jongleur de Notre Dame_. _Hérodiade_ is really a dramatic version of the Bible story of St. John and Salome. By a few trivial alterations of names and lines it was so altered as to pass the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship, and was produced at Covent Garden in 1904. The general atmosphere of the sacred subject, however, still hovered over it, and to English taste it was unpleasing and unpopular: it is perhaps the best of the Massenet operas, _Manon_ and _La Navarraise_ approaching it nearest in popular esteem. His latest success is _Le Jongleur de Notre Dame_, produced at Monte Carlo in 1902. [Sidenote: =Bruneau, 1857=] A most earnest and serious minded composer, who more closely follows Gluck and Wagner in his desire for operatic truth, is Alfred Bruneau, one of the finest of French musicians. From the first his style has been revolutionary, and owing to crudities somewhat hard to accept; but while sometimes musically deficient, his dramatic grip and sincerity of purpose are so strong that there is doubtless a future before his operas. _Le Rêve_, _L’Attaque du Moulin_, _Messidor_, and _L’Ouragan_ are the names given to his chief works, the third named of these being perhaps the best. Bruneau was fortunate in securing the services of the late M. Zola as his librettist, several prose-poems by the great novelist having been entrusted to his care. André Messager has chiefly distinguished himself by a charming light work, _La Basoche_, which has had much attention at English hands. Dubois, Paladihle, and others are still at work in the field of French opera, but perhaps its most prominent modern representative is Gustave Charpentier, whose opera _Louise_ (1900) has made a great hit, and shows possession of great gifts from which much more may in the future be expected. Vincent d’Indy, another of the younger school, is the composer of a fairly successful work, _Fervaal_. [Sidenote: =Debussy=] Claude Debussy, a composer who has written an amount of successful music of an unique kind, in that it employs mostly a scale of whole tones, rather than one of tones and semitones, produced in 1902 an opera based on Maeterlinck’s _Pelleas et Melisande_. This original and distinctive work has become highly popular, and was performed at the Covent Garden season of 1909. Here is a fragment showing the composer’s curious use of whole tones. Debussy’s “Pelleas and Melisande.” [Music] [Sidenote: =English Composers=]