dead whom no resurrection awaits.

VERDI YOUNG, AND VERDI YOUNGER

And first, for the sake of chronology, Verdi younger. "La Traviata"
was produced in 1853, says the learned Grove, which I have consulted
on the point, and "Aida" not till 1871. And though Verdi was not
young, for an ordinary man, in 1871, he was very young indeed for the
composer of "Falstaff" and "Otello"; while in the "Traviata" period
one can scarcely say he was doing more than cutting his teeth, and not
his wisdom teeth. One finds it difficult to understand how ever the
thing came to be tolerated by musicians. Of course the desire to find
a counter-blast to Wagner has done much for Verdi; but while one can
understand how Dr. Stanford and others hoped to sweep away "Parsifal"
with "Otello" and "Falstaff," it is not so easy to see what on earth
they proposed to do with "Traviata." It won fame and cash for its
composer in the old days when people went to the opera for lack of the
music-hall, not yet invented; when Costa still lorded it not over
living musical London merely, but over all the deceased masters, and
without compunction added trombones to Mozart's scores, and defiled
every masterwork he touched with his unspeakable Costamongery; when
Wagner was either unheard of or regarded as a dangerous lunatic and
immoral person; and it shows every sign of having been written to
please the opera-goers of those days. Curiously, the critics of the
time, in the words of the "Daily Telegraph," saw in "the Bayreuth
master another form of Bunyan's man with the muck-rake," who "never
sought to disguise the garbage he found in the Newgate Calendar of
Mythland, or set his imagination to invent," and they were disgusted,
also like the "Daily Telegraph," by "approaching incest" in "The
Valkyrie"; yet they saw no harm whatever in the charming story of
"Traviata"--the story of a harlot who reforms to the extent of
retaining only one lover of her many, and who dies of consumption when
that one's father does his best to drive her out upon the streets
again by making her give up his son. Far from condemning the story
myself, I am glad Verdi or his employers had the courage to go boldly
to Dumas for it; only, let us be cautious how we condemn the morality
of other opera-stories while praising the immorality of this. Let us
see how Verdi has handled it. The opera is built after the same hybrid
model as Gounod's "Romeo"; it is neither frankly the old Italian
oper