There were other reasons of a more obvious and external nature for the failure of “La Traviata” on its first production.  Lodovico Graziani, the tenor, who filled the role of Alfredo, was hoarse, and could not do justice to the music; Signora Salvini-Donatelli, the Violetta of the occasion, was afflicted with an amplitude of person which destroyed the illusion of the death scene and turned its pathos into absurdity.  The spectacle of a lady of mature years and more than generous integumental upholstery dying of consumption was more than the Venetian sense of humor could endure with equanimity.  The opera ended with shrieks of laughter instead of the lachrymal flood which the music and the dramatic situation called for.  This spirit of irreverence had been promoted, moreover, by the fact that the people of the play wore conventional modern clothes.  The lure of realism was not strong in the lyric theatres half a century ago, when laces and frills, top-boots and plumed hats, helped to confine the fancy to the realm of idealism in which it was believed opera ought to move.  The first result of the fiasco was a revision of the costumes and stage furniture, by which simple expedient Mr. Dumas’s Marguerite Gauthier was changed from a courtesan of the time of Louis Philippe to one of the period of Louis XIV.  It is an amusing illustration of how the whirligig of time brings its revenges that the spirit of verismo, masquerading as a desire for historical accuracy, has restored the period of the Dumas book,—­that is, restored it in name, but not in fact,—­with the result, in New York and London at least, of making the dress of the opera more absurd than ever.  Violetta, exercising the right which was conquered by the prima donna generations ago, appears always garbed in the very latest style, whether she be wearing one of her two ball dresses or her simple afternoon gown.  For aught that I know, the latest fad in woman’s dress may also be hidden in the dainty folds of the robe de chambre in which she dies.  The elder Germont has for two years appeared before the New York public as a well-to-do country gentleman of Provence might have appeared sixty years ago, but his son has thrown all sartorial scruples to the wind, and wears the white waistcoat and swallowtail of to-day.

The Venetians were allowed a year to get over the effects of the first representations of “La Traviata,” and then the opera was brought forward again with the new costumes.  Now it succeeded and set out upon the conquest of the world.  It reached London on May 24, St. Petersburg on November 1, New York on December 3, and Paris on December 6—­all in the same year, 1856.  The first Violetta in New York was Mme. Anna La Grange, the first Alfredo Signor Brignoli, and the first Germont pere Signor Amodio.  There had been a destructive competition between Max Maretzek’s Italian company at the Academy of Music and a German company at Niblo’s Garden.  The regular Italian season had come to