Feb. 13.
During the past few weeks music-lovers in Shanghai have been enjoying the very unusual treat of continuous opera; and the experience may have led some of us to overhaul our ideas on this form of entertainment. What the Italian Opera Company has given us is obviously one-sided, not in respect of performance, which was vocally good, if instrumentally uncertain; but as regards the character of operas presented. In its three centuries of existence opera has passed through many phases. Rinuceini_ and Peri, at the close of the 16th century sought to revive the traditions of Greek tragedy, only using music to intensify the tones of ordinary speech and the emotions of the speaker.
In the hands Scarlatti the melodic side of the entertainment began to gain the predominance; and from his time the "book" rapidly degenerated, until opera become nothing but a sories of pleasant melodies strung on the thinnest possible thread of story. Gluck strove to revive. and did revive, the old ideals of Peri; but having the misfortune to compete with the marvellous school of ''absolute music"' of the 18th and early 19th centuries, his teaching did not exert the influence that it might otherwise have had. The real reformer, as everyone knows, reasserting the claims of drama in music as against the claims of the adored prima donna and prime tenore, was Wagner. Since his day, we seem to see two tendencies in opera: for Richard Strauss the dramatic notion is everything, and the repres ion of gigantic feeling, degenerating (to some ways of thinking) into mere delight in what is horrible and violent; for men like Puccini. Charpentier and Cilea, a strong recognition of dramatic requirements, but even more a keen delight in melodic beauties for their' own sake, Of all these phases the Ttalian Opera Company certainly cannot be blamed for presenting but one or two aspects. On the contrary, we may be grateful to it for achieving, as successfully as it did, models so wide apart as ""Trovatore'? and '"Bohéme" or Butter fly,"" besides one other to be referred to presently. Between these extremes it is possible to imagine the other links in the chain, and to frame some answer to the question so often asked.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.