human voice, while Verdi has always tried to make the voice sound like an instrument.  His roulades and cadenzas, for example, sound prettier on the clarinet than on the voice, as one hears when he sets the one chasing the other in “Traviata”; and if only our orchestral players would take the trouble to play with the same expression as the stage artists sing, we might soon be content to have a repetition (with a difference) of the feat of the old-world conductor who, in the absence of the hero, played the part upon the harpsichord with universal applause.  The stock patterns out of which the songs are made soon grow old-fashioned, and are superseded by fresh ones:  hence Verdi’s songs are the earliest portions of his operas to wither.  There are two powerful scenes in “Aida”—­the second of the second act, and the final in the last act.  The last is certainly terribly repulsive at the first blush; but the weird chant of the priestesses in the brightly-lit temple, where the workmen are closing the entrance to the vault underneath in which we see Radames left to die, contrasts finely with the sweet music that accompanies the declaration of Aida that she has hidden there to die with him; and, while guessing at the splendour of the music Wagner might have given us here, one may still admit Verdi to have succeeded well in a smaller way than Wagner’s.  But on the whole “Aida” is to be heard once and have done with, for save these scenes there is little else in it to engage one.  Aida is alive, but Amneris is a hopeless piece of machinery—­something between the stage conception of a princess and the Lady with the Camellias, any difference in modesty being certainly not in favour of Amneris.  The music very rarely rises above commonness—­that commonness which is proclaimed in every bar of Verdi’s instrumentation, and in his shameless Salvation Army rhythms; and it is sometimes (as in the Priest’s solo with chorus in the last scene of the second act) odiously vulgar.  “Aida” is more dramatic than “Traviata,” has more of Verdi’s brusque energy, less of his sentimentality; but it has none of the youthful freshness of his latest work.  The young Verdi has already aged—­how long will the old Verdi remain young?

“THE FLYING DUTCHMAN”

Wagner took “The Flying Dutchman”, “Tannhaeuser,” and “Lohengrin,” in three long running steps; from “Lohengrin” he made a flying leap into the air, and, after spending some five or six years up there, he landed safely on “The Nibelung’s Ring.”  The leap was a prodigious one, and you may search history in vain for its like; and still more astounding was it if you reckon from the point where the run was commenced.  “The Flying Dutchman” was avowedly that point.  “Die Feen” is boyish folly, and “Rienzi” an attempt to out-Meyer Meyerbeer.  But in the “Dutchman” Wagner sought seriously to realise himself, to find the mode of best expressing the best that was in him.  That mode he found in “The Rheingold” and mastered in “The Valkyrie,” with its continuous development and transmogrification of themes.  And (to discard utterly my former metaphor) after steeping oneself for several nights in that last great river of melody, wide and deep and clear, it is interesting to be led suddenly to its source, and see it bubbling up with infinite energy, a good deal of frothing, and some brown mud.