careless listeners may easily confound one with the other.  Nevertheless, the differences between the two works are many and great, and a deep insight into the workings of Beethoven’s mind would be vouchsafed students if they were brought into juxtaposition in the concert-room.  The reason commonly given for the revision of No. 2 (the real No. 1) is that at the performance it was found that some of the passages for wind instruments troubled the players; but among the changes made by Beethoven, all of which tend to heighten the intensity of the overture which presents the drama in nuce may be mentioned the elision of a recurrence to material drawn from his principal theme between the two trumpet-calls, and the abridgment of the development or free fantasia portion.  Finally, it may be stated that though the “Fidelio” overture was written for the revival of 1814, it was not heard at the first performance in that year.  It was not ready, and the overture to “The Ruins of Athens” was played in its stead.

Footnotes: 

{1} As the opera is performed nowadays it is in three acts, but this division is the work of stage managers or directors who treat each of the three scenes as an act.  At the Metropolitan Opera House, in New York, Mr. Mahler introduced a division of the first scene into two for what can be said to be merely picturesque effect, since the division is not demanded by the dramatic situation.

{2} In Mr. Mahler’s arrangement this march becomes entr’acte music to permit of a change of scene from the interior of the jailer’s lodge to the courtyard of the prison prescribed in the book.

CHAPTER VI

“Faust”

Mm.  Michel Carre and Jules Barbier, who made the book for Gounod’s opera “Faust,” went for their subject to Goethe’s dramatic poem.  Out of that great work, which had occupied the mind of the German poet for an ordinary lifetime, the French librettists extracted the romance which sufficed them—­the story of Gretchen’s love for the rejuvenated philosopher, her seduction and death.  This romance is wholly the creation of Goethe; it has no place in any of the old legends which are at the bottom of the history of Dr. Faust, or Faustus.  Those legends deal with the doings of a magician who has sold his soul to the devil for the accomplishment of some end on which his ambition is set.  There are many such legends in mediaeval literature, and their fundamental thought is older than Christianity.  In a sense, the idea is a product of ignorance and superstition combined.  In all ages men whose learning and achievements were beyond the comprehension of simple folk were thought to have derived their powers from the practice of necromancy.  The list is a long one, and includes some of the great names of antiquity.  The imagination of the Middle Ages made bondsmen of the infernal powers out of such men