his sweetheart’s maid, who tells him that his joy is at an end, and then he howls “O mio rimorso” to a march-tune of the rowdiest kind.  Equally undramatic, untrue, false in feeling, are the sentimental ditties sung by Alfredo’s father.  The last act is best; but I must say that I have always found it a tedious business to watch Albani die of consumption.  At the production of the piece, a soprano who must have looked quite as healthy played Violetta, and it is recorded that, when the doctor told how rapidly she was wasting away and announced her speedy decease, the theatre broke into uproarious merriment.  I respect Madame Albani too highly to break into uproarious merriment at her pretence of consumption; but no one is better pleased when the business is over, although the music is more satisfactory here than in any other portion of the opera.  Anyone who has sat at night with a friend down with toothache or cholera will recognise the atmosphere of the sickroom at once.  But it is not pleasant enough to atone for the rest of the opera.  For, to sum up, there is small interest in the drama, and, on the whole, smaller beauty in the music, of “La Traviata.”  It was made, as bonnets were made, to sell in the fifties; like the bonnets sold in the fifties, it is hopelessly out of date now; and it wants the inherent vitality that keeps the masterworks alive after the fashion in which they were written has passed away.  The younger Verdi is not, after all, so vast an improvement on Donizetti and Bellini.  His melodies are too often sadly sentimental, and any freshness with which he may have endowed them has long since faded.  True, they occasionally have a terseness and pungency, a sheer brute force, which those other composers never got into their insipid tunes; while, on the other hand, Verdi rarely shows his strength without also showing a degree of vulgarity from which Bellini and Donizetti were for the most part free.

“Aida” is a different matter, though not so very different a matter.  Here we have the young Verdi—­Verdi in his early prime, for he was only fifty-eight; here also we have a story more likely to stir his rowdy imagination, if not more susceptible of effective treatment in the young Verdi manner.  The misfortune is that the book is a very excerebrose affair.  The drama does not begin until the third act:  the two first are yawning abysms of sheer dulness.  Who wants to see that Radames loves Aida, that Amneris, the king’s daughter, loves Radames, that Aida, a slave, is the daughter of the King of the Ethiopians, that Radames goes on a war expedition against that king, beats him and fetches him back a prisoner, that the other king gives Radames his daughter in marriage, that Radames, highly honoured, yet wishes to goodness he could get out of it somehow?  A master of drama would begin in the third act, reveal the whole past in a pregnant five minutes, and then hold us breathless while we watched to see whether Radames would yield