may possibly prefer even
the insincere and unsatisfactory form of Italian opera which it
represents to the perfectly sincere and perfectly satisfactory kind
represented, say, by "La Favorita." For, as I said, when Italian opera
is sincere it offers what no one wants--ear-tickling, and
ear-tickling, moreover, of a sort which is gone completely out of
fashion. Donizetti was a genuine descendant of the true line of
opera-composers upon whom Gluck laid his curse, and he spent his life
in devising pleasant noises to make his patrons' evenings pass
agreeably. I cannot believe that anyone ever yet understood what "La
Favorita" is all about, or that anyone ever wanted to understand. It
is a series of songs of the inanest and insanest sort, without a
single expressive bar, or a single tone-pattern which is beautiful
regarded simply as a pattern. Even the famous "Spirito Gentil" is
merely a stream of the brackish water that flowed, day and night, from
Donizetti's pen, only it happens to be a little clearer than usual.
But those tunes, so feeble and insipid now, pleased the ears of the
time when Lord Steyne went to the opera for a momentary respite from
boredom and to recruit his harem from the ballet corps; and Donizetti
wrote them with no intention of posing as a grand composer, but simply
as a humble purveyor of sweetmeats. In those days there was no
music-hall, and the opera had to serve its purpose: hence the slight
confusion which results in Donizetti, poor soul, being thought a
better man than Mr. Jacobi is thought at the present time, although
Mr. Jacobi cannot have less than a thousand times Donizetti's brains
and invention. Mr. Jacobi's music is capital in its place; but I doubt
whether it will be revived fifty years hence; and but for the fact
that Donizetti was an opera-composer--and Mozart and Gluck were
opera-composers too!--it is pretty certain that not the united prayers
of Patti, Albani, Melba, and Eames would induce any operatic
management to resurrect "La Favorita." Even up-to-date ear-tickling is
not popular now in the opera-house: we go to the music-hall for it;
and we don't want to pay a guinea at the opera to be tickled in a way
that arouses no pleasurable sensations. Those terrific tonic and
dominant passages for the trombones, sounding like the furious sawing
of logs of wood, only make us laugh; and pretty tootlings of the
flutes have long been done better, and overdone, elsewhere. Donizetti
is amongst the