he wrote to Muzio:  “‘La Traviata’ last night a failure.  Was the fault mine or the singers’?  Time will tell.”  To Vincenzo Luccardi, sculptor, professor at the Academy of San Luca in Rome, one of his most intimate friends, he wrote after, the second performance:  “The success was a fiasco—­a complete fiasco!  I do not know whose fault it was; it is best not to talk about it.  I shall tell you nothing about the music, and permit me to say nothing about the performers.”  Plainly, he did not hold the singers guiltless.  Varesi, the barytone, who was intrusted with the part of the elder Germont, had been disaffected, because he thought it beneath his dignity.  Nevertheless, he went to the composer and offered his condolences at the fiasco.  Verdi wanted none of his sympathy.  “Condole with yourself and your companions who have not understood my music,” was his somewhat ungracious rejoinder.  No doubt the singers felt some embarrassment in the presence of music which to them seemed new and strange in a degree which we cannot appreciate now.  Abramo Basevi, an Italian critic, who wrote a book of studies on Verdi’s operas, following the fashion set by Lenz in his book on Beethoven, divides the operas which he had written up to the critic’s time into examples of three styles, the early operas marking his first manner and “Luisa Miller” the beginning of his second.  In “La Traviata” he says Verdi discovered a third manner, resembling in some things the style of French oeera comique.  “This style of music,” he says, “although it has not been tried on the stage in Italy, is, however, not unknown in private circles.  In these latter years we have seen Luigi Gordigiani and Fabio Campana making themselves known principally in this style of music, called da camera.  Verdi, with his ‘Traviata,’ has transported this chamber-music on to the stage, to which the subject he has chosen still lends itself, and with happy success.  We meet with more simplicity in this work than in the others of the same composer, especially as regards the orchestra, where the quartet of stringed instruments is almost always predominant; the parlanti occupy a great part of the score; we meet with several of those airs which repeat under the form of verses; and, finally, the principal vocal subjects are for the most part developed in short binary and ternary movements, and have not, in general, the extension which the Italian style demands.”  Campana and Gordigiani were prolific composers of romanzas and canzonettas of a popular type.  Their works are drawing-room music, very innocuous, very sentimental, very insignificant, and very far from the conception of chamber-music generally prevalent now.  How they could have been thought to have influenced so virile a composer as Verdi, it is difficult to see.  But musical critics enjoy a wide latitude of observation.  In all likelihood there was nothing more in Dr. Basevi’s mind than the strophic structure of “Di Provenza,” the song style of some of the other arias to which attention has been called and the circumstance that these, the most striking numbers in the score, mark the points of deepest feeling.  In this respect, indeed, there is some relationship between “La Traviata” and “Der Freischutz”—­though this is an observation which will probably appear as far-fetched to some of my critics as Dr. Basevi’s does to me.