titles are given to Lysiart.  Euryanthe is led into the desert to be killed by Adolar.  On the way he is attacked by a serpent, which he kills, though not before Euryanthe has proved her devotion by offering to die in her lover’s place.  Adolar then leaves Euryanthe to perish, declaring that he has not the heart to kill her.  She is found in a dying condition by the King, whom she speedily convinces of her innocence.  Meanwhile Adolar has returned to Nevers, to encounter the bridal procession of Eglantine and Lysiart.  Eglantine confesses that she helped to ruin Euryanthe in the hope of winning Adolar, and is promptly stabbed by Lysiart.  Everything being satisfactorily cleared up, Euryanthe conveniently awakes from a trance into which she had fallen, and the lovers are finally united.  Puerile as the libretto is, it inspired Weber with some of the finest music he ever wrote.  The spectacular portions of the opera are animated by the true spirit of chivalry, while all that is connected with the incomprehensible Emma and her secret is unspeakably eerie.  The characters of the drama are such veritable puppets, that no expenditure of talent could make them interesting; but the resemblance between the general scheme of the plot of ‘Euryanthe’ and that of ‘Lohengrin’ should not be passed over, nor the remarkable way in which Weber had anticipated some of Wagner’s most brilliant triumphs, notably in the characters of Eglantine and Lysiart, who often seem curiously to foreshadow Ortrud and Telramund, and in the finale to the second act, in which the single voice of Euryanthe, like that of Elisabeth in ‘Tannhaeuser,’ is contrasted with the male chorus.

Weber’s last opera, ‘Oberon,’ is one of the few works written in recent times by a foreign composer of the first rank for the English stage.  The libretto, which was the work of Planche, is founded upon an old French romance, ‘Huon of Bordeaux,’ and though by no means a model of lucidity, it contains many scenes both powerful and picturesque, which must have captivated the imagination of a musician so impressionable as Weber.  The opera opens in fairyland, where a bevy of fairies is watching the slumbers of Oberon.  The fairy king has quarrelled with Titania, and has vowed never to be reconciled to her until he shall find two lovers constant to each other through trial and temptation.  Puck, who has been despatched to search for such a pair, enters with the news that Sir Huon of Bordeaux, who had accidentally slain the son of Charlemagne, has been commanded, in expiation of his crime, to journey to Bagdad, to claim the Caliph’s daughter as his bride, and slay the man who sits at his right hand.  Oberon forthwith throws Huon into a deep sleep, and in a vision shows him Rezia, the daughter of the Caliph, of whom the ardent knight instantly becomes enamoured.  He then conveys him to the banks of the Tigris, and giving him a magic horn, starts him upon his dangerous enterprise.  In the Caliph’s palace Huon fights with Babekan,