grip of the principles of stage effect.  Her latest work ‘Strandrecht,’ in English ‘The Wreckers’ (1906), was produced at Leipzig, and shortly afterwards was given at Prague.  It has not yet found its way to London.  The scene is laid in Cornwall in the eighteenth century.  The inhabitants of that wild coast, though fervent Methodists, live by ‘wrecking,’ in which they are encouraged by their minister.  Thurza, the minister’s faithless wife, alone protests against their cruelty and hypocrisy, and persuades her lover, a young fisherman, to light fires in order to warn mariners from the dangerous coast.  The treachery, as it seems to the rest of the villagers, of Thurza and her lover is discovered, and after a rough-and-ready trial they are left in a cavern close to the sea to be overwhelmed by the rising tide.  Miss Smyth’s music is spoken of as strongly dramatic, and marked by a keen sense of characterisation.

The operas of Mr. Isidore de Lara, a composer who, in spite of his name, is said to be of English extraction, may conveniently be mentioned here.  It is generally understood that the production of these works at Covent Garden was due to causes other than their musical value, but in any case they do not call for detailed criticism.  Mr. de Lara’s earlier works, ‘The Light of Asia,’ ‘Amy Robsart,’ and ‘Moina’ failed completely.  There is better work in ‘Messaline’ (1899).  The musical ideas are poor in quality, but the score is put together in a workmanlike manner, and the orchestration is often clever.  The libretto, which recounts the intrigues of the Empress Messalina with two brothers, Hares and Helion, a singer and a gladiator, is in the highest degree repellent, and it would need far better music than Mr. de Lara’s to reconcile a London audience to so outrageous a subject.  Mr. de Lara’s latest production, ‘Sanga’ (1906), does not seem to have sustained the promise of ‘Messaline.’  Another composer whom necessity has driven to ally his music to a foreign libretto is Mr. Herbert Bunning, whose opera ‘La Princesse Osra’ was produced at Covent Garden in 1902.  Mr. Alick Maclean, whose ‘Quentin Durward’ and ‘Petruccio’ had already shown remarkable promise, has lately won considerable success in Germany with ‘Die Liebesgeige.’

Scanty is the catalogue of noteworthy operas with English words produced in recent years.  The most remarkable of them are Mr. Colin MacAlpin’s ‘The Cross and the Crescent,’ which won the prize offered by Mr. Charles Manners in 1903 for an English opera, and Mr. Nicholas Gatty’s ‘Greysteel,’ a very able and musicianly setting of an episode from one of the Norse sagas, which was produced at Sheffield in 1906.

It is difficult to be sanguine as to the prospects of English opera.  Circumstances are certainly against the production of original work in this country, though it is legitimate to hope that the recent revival of interest in Sullivan’s works may lead our composers to devote their energies to the higher forms of comic opera.  Anything is better than the mere imitation of foreign models which has for so long been characteristic of English opera.  By turning to the melodies of his native land, Weber founded German opera, and if we are ever to have a school of opera in England we must begin by building upon a similar foundation.