throws herself into Loris’s arms, bidding him stay with her rather than leave the house to fall into the hands of spies.  In the third act Fedora, certain of detection, confesses to Loris her previous machinations against him, which have resulted in the deaths of his mother and brother, and takes poison before his eyes.  Giordano touched a far higher level in ‘Siberia’ (1903), a gloomy tale of Russian crime and punishment.  Stephana, a courtesan, among all her lovers cares only for the young sergeant Vassili.  Vassili, who has learnt to love her, not knowing who she is, when he discovers the truth, bursts in upon a fete she is giving, quarrels with a lieutenant and kills him on the spot.  He is condemned to exile in Siberia, but is followed by Stephana, who overtakes him at the frontier, and gets leave to share his fate.  In the mines they find Globy, Stephana’s original seducer, whose infamy she exposes to the assembled convicts.  In revenge Globy betrays to the authorities a project of escape devised by Stephana and Vassili, and the lovers are shot just as liberty appears to be within their grasp.  The music of ‘Siberia’ is more artistic than anything Giordano has previously written.  The situations are skilfully handled, and the note of pity and pathos is touched with no uncertain hand.  The opera is unequal, but the scene of the halt at the frontier is treated in masterly fashion.

Francesco Cilea won no marked success until the production of his ‘Adriana Lecouvreur’ in 1902.  The plot is an adaptation of Scribe’s famous play, but so trenchantly abbreviated as to be almost incomprehensible.  The opening scene in the foyer of the Comedie Francaise is bright and lively, the handling of the score arousing pleasant reminiscences of Verdi’s ‘Falstaff,’ but the more dramatic passages in the struggle of Adrienne and her rival the Princess de Bouillon for Maurice de Saxe seem to be outside the scope of the composer’s talent, and the great moments of the piece are somewhat frigid and unimpressive.  There is a note of pathos, however, in Adrienne’s death-scene, and the character of Michonnet is elaborated with skill and feeling.  Cilea’s latest opera, ‘Gloria’ (1907), a blood-thirsty story of the struggle between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, does not appear to have won much favour in Italy.

Edoardo Mascheroni’s early laurels were won as a conductor, but in 1901 he sprang into fame as the composer of ‘Lorenza,’ an opera which has met with much success in various cities of Spain and Spanish America as well as in Italy.  ‘Lorenza’ is a Calabrian version of the time-honoured story of Judith and Holofernes, though in this case the Judith, so far from slaying her brigand Holofernes, falls in love with him, and ends by disguising herself in his cloak and allowing herself to be shot by the soldiers who come to capture the bandit chief.  Mascheroni’s score overflows with thoroughly Italian melody, and shows considerable knowledge of dramatic effect, which from a conductor of his experience was only to be expected.