cutting his teeth, and not his wisdom teeth.  One finds it difficult to understand how ever the thing came to be tolerated by musicians.  Of course the desire to find a counter-blast to Wagner has done much for Verdi; but while one can understand how Dr. Stanford and others hoped to sweep away “Parsifal” with “Otello” and “Falstaff,” it is not so easy to see what on earth they proposed to do with “Traviata.”  It won fame and cash for its composer in the old days when people went to the opera for lack of the music-hall, not yet invented; when Costa still lorded it not over living musical London merely, but over all the deceased masters, and without compunction added trombones to Mozart’s scores, and defiled every masterwork he touched with his unspeakable Costamongery; when Wagner was either unheard of or regarded as a dangerous lunatic and immoral person; and it shows every sign of having been written to please the opera-goers of those days.  Curiously, the critics of the time, in the words of the “Daily Telegraph,” saw in “the Bayreuth master another form of Bunyan’s man with the muck-rake,” who “never sought to disguise the garbage he found in the Newgate Calendar of Mythland, or set his imagination to invent,” and they were disgusted, also like the “Daily Telegraph,” by “approaching incest” in “The Valkyrie”; yet they saw no harm whatever in the charming story of “Traviata”—­the story of a harlot who reforms to the extent of retaining only one lover of her many, and who dies of consumption when that one’s father does his best to drive her out upon the streets again by making her give up his son.  Far from condemning the story myself, I am glad Verdi or his employers had the courage to go boldly to Dumas for it; only, let us be cautious how we condemn the morality of other opera-stories while praising the immorality of this.  Let us see how Verdi has handled it.  The opera is built after the same hybrid model as Gounod’s “Romeo”; it is neither frankly the old Italian opera, existing for the sake of its songs, nor the later form in which the songs exist for the sake of the drama, but an attempt to combine the songs with the continuous working out of a dramatic impulse in the modern manner.  But the attempt is far less successful than in “Romeo”; and indeed it is a faint-hearted one.  Whenever a song occurs, the action is suspended, and all the actors save the lucky vocalist of the minute are at their wits’ end to know where to look, and what to do with their hands, feet—­their whole persons in fact—­and the parts they are playing.  And the songs are far from being expressive of the feeling of the situation that is supposed to call them up.  The drinking tune in the first act is lively and appropriate enough; and not much more can be said against Violetta’s song, “Ah! fors’ e lui,” than that while rather pretty its endless cadenzas are more than rather absurd.  But in the next act Alfredo sings of the dream of his life to a pretty melody until he is interrupted by