Bourbon Street was
built) there was a regular annual season of opera at the Orleans
Theater, long since destroyed.

In the days of the city's operatic grandeur great singers used to visit
New Orleans before visiting New York, as witness, for example, the debut
at the French Opera House of Adelina Patti. Since the time of the Civil
War, however, the city has suffered a decline in this department of art.
Opera seasons have not been regular, and in spite of occasional attempts
to revive the old-time spirit, the ancient Opera House, with its brave
columned front, its cracking veneer of stucco, and its surrounding of
little vari-colored one story cafes and shops (which are themselves like
bits of operatic scenery), does not so much suggest to the imagination a
home of modern opera, as a mournful mortuary chapel haunted by the
ghosts of old half-forgotten composers: Herold, Spontini, Mehul, Varney;
old conductors, long since gone to dust: Prevost, John, Calabresi; old
arias of Meyerbeer, Auber, and Donizetti; and above all, by the ghosts
of pretty pirouetting ballerinas, and of great singers whose voices
have, these many years, been still.

An old lady who knew Louisiana in the forties and fifties, has left
record of the fact that plantation negroes used to know and sing the
French operatic airs, just as the Italian peasants of to-day know and
sing the music of Puccini and Leoncavallo. But if opera no longer
reaches the negro, it cannot be said that it has failed to leave its
stamp on the French quarter. From open windows and doors, from little
shops and half-hidden courtyards, from shuttered second story galleries,
there comes floating to the ears of the wayfarer the sound of music. In
one house a piano is being played with dash; in another a child is
practising her scales; from still another comes a soprano voice, the sad
whistling of a flute, the tinkle of a guitar, or the anguished squeal of
a tortured violin. Never except in Naples have I heard, on one block, so
many musical instruments independently at work, as in some single blocks
of the _vieux carre_; and never anywhere have I seen a sign which struck
as more expressive of the industries of a locality, than that one which
I saw near the house of Mme. Lalurie, which read: "Odd Jobs Done, and
Music."

The reason for this musical congestion is twofold. Not only is the
Creole a great lover of good light music, but the whole region for
blocks about the Opera House is p