sing
with rhythmic life, is the best Spanish music we have yet heard in
this country. The whole entertainment, music, colours, costumes,
songs, dances, and all, is as nicely arranged in its crescendos and
decrescendos, its prestos and adagios as a Mozart finale. The close of
the first act, in which the ladies sweep the stage with long ruffled
trains, suggestive of all the Manet pictures you have ever seen, would
seem to be unapproachable, but the most striking costumes and the
wildest dancing are reserved for the very last scene of all. There
these bewildering senoritas come forth in the splendourous envelope of
embroidered Manila shawls, and such shawls! Prehistoric African roses
of unbelievable measure decorate a texture of turquoise, from which
depends nearly a yard of silken fringe. In others mingle royal purple
and buff, orange and white, black and the kaleidoscope! The revue, a
sublimated form of zarzuela, is calculated, indeed, to hold you in a
dangerous state of nervous excitement during the entire evening, to
keep you awake for the rest of the night, and to entice you to the
theatre the next night and the next. It is as intoxicating as vodka,
as insidious as cocaine, and it is likely to become a habit, like
these stimulants. I have found, indeed, that it appeals to all classes
of taste, from that of a telephone operator, whose usual artistic
debauch is the latest antipyretic novel of Robert W. Chambers, to that
of the frequenter of the concert halls.

I cannot resist further cataloguing; details shake their fists at my
memory; for instance, the intricate rhythms of Valverde's elaborately
syncopated music (not at all like ragtime syncopation), the thrilling
orchestration (I remember one dance which is accompanied by drum taps
and oboe, nothing else!), the utter absence of tangos (which are
Argentine), and habaneras (which are Cuban), most of the music being
written in two-four and three-four time, and the interesting use of
folk-tunes; the casual and very suggestive indifference of the
dancers, while they are not dancing, seemingly models for a dozen
Zuloaga paintings, the apparently inexhaustible skill and variety of
these dancers in action, winding ornaments around the melodies with
their feet and bodies and arms and heads and castanets as coloratura
sopranos do with their voices. Sometimes castanets are not used;
cymbals supplant them, or tambourines, or even fingers. Once, by some
esoteric witchcraft, the d