The libretto of the Third Act was steeped in the sentiment of Young Italy.  I wish that I could pipe to your mind’s hearing any notion of the fine music of Rocco Ricci, and touch you to feel the revelations which were in this new voice.  Rocco and Vittoria gave the verses a life that cannot belong to them now; yet, as they contain much of the vital spirit of the revolt, they may assist you to some idea of the faith animating its heads, and may serve to justify this history.

Rocco’s music in the opera of Camilla had been sprung from a fresh Italian well; neither the elegiac-melodious, nor the sensuous-lyrical, nor the joyous buffo; it was severe as an old masterpiece, with veins of buoyant liveliness threading it, and with sufficient distinctness of melody to enrapture those who like to suck the sugarplums of sound.  He would indeed have favoured the public with more sweet things, but Vittoria, for whom the opera was composed, and who had been at his elbow, was young, and stern in her devotion to an ideal of classical music that should elevate and never stoop to seduce or to flatter thoughtless hearers.  Her taste had directed as her voice had inspired the opera.  Her voice belonged to the order of the simply great voices, and was a royal voice among them.  Pure without attenuation, passionate without contortion, when once heard it exacted absolute confidence.  On this night her theme and her impersonation were adventitious introductions, but there were passages when her artistic pre-eminence and the sovereign fulness and fire of her singing struck a note of grateful remembered delight.  This is what the great voice does for us.  It rarely astonishes our ears.  It illumines our souls, as you see the lightning make the unintelligible craving darkness leap into long mountain ridges, and twisting vales, and spires of cities, and inner recesses of light within light, rose-like, toward a central core of violet heat.

At the rising of the curtain the knights of the plains, Rudolfo, Romualdo, Arnoldo, and others, who were conspiring to overthrow Count Orso at the time when Camillo’s folly ruined all, assemble to deplore Camilla’s banishment, and show, bereft of her, their helplessness and indecision.  They utter contempt of Camillo, who is this day to be Pontifically divorced from his wife to espouse the detested Michiella.  His taste is not admired.

They pass off.  Camillo appears.  He is, as he knows, little better than a pensioner in Count Orso’s household.  He holds his lands on sufferance.  His faculties are paralyzed.  He is on the first smooth shoulder-slope of the cataract.  He knows that not only was his jealousy of his wife groundless, but it was forced by a spleenful pride.  What is there to do?  Nothing, save resignedly to prepare for his divorce from the conspiratrix Camilla and espousals with Michiella.  The cup is bitter, and his song is mournful.  He does the rarest thing a man will do in such a predicament—­