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S62 curiosities of music. |
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earth, saved by the prayers of Alice, — after a moment of indecision (not remembering the denouement) leaped after him.
There was general consternation on the stage, for all thought that Nourrit was injured. In the audience they must have thought that the opera had a rather immoral ending, since Bertram, the tempter, had triumphed over the prayers of Alice.
Fortunately the mattresses had not been removed; and Bertram was vastly astonished to find that he had bagged his victim after all; he asked Nourrit in amazement.—" Has the plot been changed?" but Nourrit recollecting his mistake, hastened back to the stage, where the audience were astonished to see him reappear, but soon grasping the situation burst into loud applause.
The curiosities of the opera of to-day are even greater than those of twenty years since, for the world has found an iconoclastic composer who is endeavoring to reform all that went before him, by pulling it to pieces. Yet he has done opera precisely the service which it at present needed, in showing composers the importance of bestowing a greater attention upon the libretto, and elevating the orchestra as well as the scene painter to their proper places; his idea that an opera should be a "perfect chrysolite," a complete picture in all its accessories, is the true one, though his mode of effecting it may not be.
His zeal has allowed him to commit a ludicrous "curiosity of music" in attacking almost all that the Jews hare ever done in music, and |
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