for a great achievement when it came to providing a setting for the scenes in which the priests figure.  The rest of the music he seems to have written with little regard to coherency or unity of character.  His sister-in-law had a voice of extraordinary range and elasticity; hence the two display airs; Papageno had to have music in keeping in his character, and Mozart doubtless wrote it with as little serious thought as he did the “Piece for an Organ in a Clock, in F minor, 4-4,” and “Andante to a Waltz for a Little Organ,” which can be found entered in his autograph catalogue for the last year of his life.  In the overture, one of the finest of his instrumental compositions, he returned to a form that had not been in use since the time of Hasse and Graum; in the scene with the two men in armor he made use of a German chorale sung in octaves as a canto firmo, with counterpoint in the orchestra—­a recondite idea which it is difficult to imagine him inventing for this opera.  I fancy (not without evidence) that he made the number out of material found in his sketch-book.  These things indicate that the depth which the critics with deep-diving and bottom-scraping proclivities affect to see in the work is rather the product of imagination than real.

Footnotes: 

{1} These chords, played by all the wind instruments of the band, are the chords of the introduction raised to a higher power.

CHAPTER IV

“Don Giovanni”

In the preceding chapter it was remarked that Mozart’s “Zauberflote” was the oldest German opera in the current American repertory.  Accepting the lists of the last two decades as a criterion, “Don Giovanni” is the oldest Italian opera, save one.  That one is “Le Nozze di Figaro,” and it may, therefore, be said that Mozart’s operas mark the beginning of the repertory as it exists at the present time in America.  Twenty-five years ago it was possible to hear a few performances of Gluck’s “Orfeo” in English and Italian, and its name has continued to figure occasionally ever since in the lists of works put forth by managers when inviting subscriptions for operatic seasons; but that fact can scarcely be said to have kept the opera in the repertory.

Our oldest Italian opera is less than 125 years old, and “Don Giovanni” only 122—­an inconsiderable age for a first-class work of art compared with its companion pieces in literature, painting, and sculpture, yet a highly respectable one for an opera.  Music has undergone a greater revolution within the last century than any other art in thrice the period, yet “Don Giovanni” is as much admired now as it was in the last decade of the eighteenth century, and, indeed, has less prejudice to contend with in the minds of musicians and critics than it had when it was in its infancy, and I confidently believe that to its score and that of “Le Nozze