s well
as puerilities and shocking vulgarities.

Public curiosity was aroused for a long time by clever advance notices
and had reached a high pitch when _L'Etoile du Nord_ appeared. The work
was carried by the exceptional talents of Bataille and Caroline Duprez
and was enormously successful at the start, but this success has grown
steadily less. Faure and Madame Patti gave some fine performances in
London. We shall probably never see their equal again, and it is not
desirable that we should either from the standpoint of art or of the
author.

_Les Huguenots_ was not an opera pieced together out of others, but it
did not reach the public as the author wrote it. At the beginning of the
first act there was a game of cup and ball on which the author had set
his heart. But the balls had to strike at the exact moment indicated in
the score and the players never succeeded in accomplishing that. The
passage had to be suppressed but it is preserved in the library at the
Opera. They also had to suppress the part of Catherine de Medici who
should preside at the conference where the massacre of St. Bartholomew
was planned. Her part was merged with that of St. Pris. They also
suppressed the first scene in the last act, where Raoul, disheveled and
covered with blood, interrupted the ball and upset the merriment by
announcing the massacre to the astonished dancers.

But it is a question whether we should believe the legend that the great
duet, the climax of the whole work, was improvised during the rehearsals
at the request of Norritt and Madame Falcon. It is hard to believe that.
The work, as is well known, was taken from Merimee's _Chronique du regne
de Charles IX_. This scene is in the romance and it is almost impossible
that Meyerbeer had no idea of putting it into his opera. More probably
the people at the theatre wanted the act to end with the blessing of the
daggers, and the author with his duet in his portfolio only had to take
it out to satisfy his interpreters. A beautiful scene like this with its
sweep and pleasing innovation is not written hastily. This duet should
be heard when the author's intentions and the nuances which make a part
of the idea are respected and not replaced by inventions in bad taste
which they dare to call traditions. The real traditions have been lost
and this admirable scene has lost its beauty.

The manner in which the duet ends has not been noted sufficiently.
Raoul's phrase, _God guard our d