first production raised questions of taste and morals which have remained open ever since.  Whether the anathema periodically pronounced against them by private and official censorship helps or hinders the growth of such works in popularity, there is no need of discussing here.  There can scarcely be a doubt, however, but that many theatrical managers of to-day would hail with pleasure and expectation of profit such a controversy over one of their new productions as greeted “La Traviata” in London.  The Lord Chamberlain had refused to sanction the English adaptations of “La Dame aux Camelias,” and when the opera was brought forward (performance being allowed because it was sung in a foreign language), pulpit and press thundered in denunciation of it.  Mr. Lumley, the manager of Her Majesty’s Theatre, came to the defence of the work in a letter to the Times, but it was more his purpose to encourage popular excitement and irritate curiosity than to shield the opera from condemnation.  He had every reason to be satisfied with the outcome.  “La Traviata” had made a complete fiasco, on its production in Italy, where no one dreamed of objecting to the subject-matter of its story; in London there was a loud outcry against the “foul and hideous horrors of the book,” and the critics found little to praise in the music; yet the opera scored a tremendous popular success, and helped to rescue Her Majesty’s from impending ruin.

CHAPTER X

“Aida”

Two erroneous impressions concerning Verdi’s “Aida” may as well as not be corrected at the beginning of a study of that opera:  it was not written to celebrate the completion of the Suez Canal, nor to open the Italian Opera-house at Cairo, though the completion of the canal and the inauguration of the theatre were practically contemporaneous with the conception of the plan which gave the world one of Verdi’s finest and also most popular operas.  It is more difficult to recall a season in any of the great lyric theatres of the world within the last thirty-five years in which “Aida” was not given than to enumerate a score of productions with particularly fine singers and imposing mise en scene.  With it Verdi ought to have won a large measure of gratitude from singers and impresarios as well as the fortune which it brought him; for though, like all really fine works, it rewards effort and money bestowed upon it with corresponding and proportionate generosity, it does not depend for its effectiveness on extraordinary vocal outfit or scenic apparel.  Fairly well sung and acted and respectably dressed, it always wins the sympathies and warms the enthusiasm of an audience the world over.  It is seldom thought of as a conventional opera, and yet it is full of conventionalities which do not obtrude themselves simply because there is so much that is individual about its music and its pictures—­particularly its pictures.  Save for the features of its score