A Second Book of Operas | Page 7

piece
of music its mission was to introduce an adventure of the Emperor
Aurelianus in Palmyra in the third century of the Christian era. Having
served that purpose it became the prelude to another opera which dealt
with Queen Elizabeth of England, a monarch who reigned some twelve
hundred years after Aurelianus. Again, before the melody now known
as that of Almaviva's cavatina had burst into the efflorescence which
now distinguishes it, it came as a chorus from the mouths of Cyrus and
his Persians in ancient Babylon.
When Mr. Lumley desired to produce Verdi's "Nabucodonosor" (called
"Nabucco" for short) in London in 1846 he deferred to English tradition
and brought out the opera as "Nino, Re d'Assyria." I confess that I
cannot conceive how changing a king of Babylon to a king of Assyria
could possibly have brought about a change one way or the other in the
effectiveness of Verdi's Italian music, but Mr. Lumley professed to
have found in the transformation reason for the English failure. At any
rate, he commented, in his "Reminiscences of the Opera," "That the
opera thus lost much of its original character, especially in the scene
where the captive Israelites became very uninteresting Babylonians,
and was thereby shorn of one element of success present on the
Continent, is undeniable."
There is another case even more to the purpose of this present
discussion. In 1818 Rossini produced his opera "Mose in Egitto" in
Naples. The strength of the work lay in its choruses; yet two of them
were borrowed from the composer's "Armida." In 1822 Bochsa
performed it as an oratorio at Covent Garden, but, says John Ebers in
his "Seven Years of the King's Theatre," published in 1828, "the
audience accustomed to the weighty metal and pearls of price of
Handel's compositions found the 'Moses' as dust in the balance in
comparison." "The oratorio having failed as completely as erst did
Pharaoh's host," Ebers continues, "the ashes of 'Mose in Egitto' revived
in the form of an opera entitled 'Pietro l'Eremita.' Moses was
transformed into Peter. In this form the opera was as successful as it
had been unfortunate as an oratorio.... 'Mose in Egitto' was condemned
as cold, dull, and heavy. 'Pietro l'Eremita,' Lord Sefton, one of the most

competent judges of the day, pronounced to be the most effective opera
produced within his recollection; and the public confirmed the justice
of the remark, for no opera during my management had such
unequivocal success." [Footnote: "Seven Years of the King's Theatre,"
by John Ebers, pp. 157, 158.] This was not the end of the opera's
vicissitudes, to some of which I shall recur presently; let this suffice
now:
Rossini rewrote it in 1827, adding some new music for the Academie
Royal in Paris, and called it "Moise"; when it was revived for the
Covent Garden oratorios, London, in 1833, it was not only performed
with scenery and dresses, but recruited with music from Handel's
oratorio and renamed "The Israelites in Egypt; or the Passage of the
Red Sea"; when the French "Moise" reached the Royal Italian Opera,
Covent Garden, in April, 1850, it had still another name, "Zora,"
though Chorley does not mention the fact in his "Thirty Years' Musical
Recollections," probably because the failure of the opera which he
loved grieved him too deeply. For a long time "Moses" occupied a
prominent place among oratorios. The Handel and Haydn Society of
Boston adopted it in 1845, and between then and 1878 performed it
forty-five times.
In all the years of my intimate association with the lyric drama
(considerably more than the number of which Mr. Chorley has left us a
record) I have seen but one opera in which the plot adheres to the
Biblical story indicated by its title. That opera is Saint- Saens's
"Samson et Dalila." I have seen others whose titles and dramatis
personae suggested narratives found in Holy Writ, but in nearly all
these cases it would be a profanation of the Book to call them Biblical
operas. Those which come to mind are Goldmark's "Konigin von
Saba," Massenet's "Herodiade" and Richard Strauss's "Salome." I have
heard, in whole or part, but not seen, three of the works which
Rubinstein would fain have us believe are operas, but which are
not--"Das verlorene Paradies," "Der Thurmbau zu Babel" and "Moses";
and I have a study acquaintance with the books and scores of his
"Maccabaer," which is an opera; his "Sulamith," which tries to be one,
and his "Christus," which marks the culmination of the vainest effort

that a contemporary composer made to parallel Wagner's achievement
on a different line. There are other works which are sufficiently known
to me through library communion or concert-room contact to enable me
to claim enough acquaintanceship to justify converse about them and
which