ara's earlier
works, 'The Light of Asia,' 'Amy Robsart,' and 'Moina' failed
completely. There is better work in 'Messaline' (1899). The musical
ideas are poor in quality, but the score is put together in a
workmanlike manner, and the orchestration is often clever. The libretto,
which recounts the intrigues of the Empress Messalina with two brothers,
Hares and Helion, a singer and a gladiator, is in the highest degree
repellent, and it would need far better music than Mr. de Lara's to
reconcile a London audience to so outrageous a subject. Mr. de Lara's
latest production, 'Sanga' (1906), does not seem to have sustained the
promise of 'Messaline.' Another composer whom necessity has driven to
ally his music to a foreign libretto is Mr. Herbert Bunning, whose opera
'La Princesse Osra' was produced at Covent Garden in 1902. Mr. Alick
Maclean, whose 'Quentin Durward' and 'Petruccio' had already shown
remarkable promise, has lately won considerable success in Germany with
'Die Liebesgeige.'

Scanty is the catalogue of noteworthy operas with English words produced
in recent years. The most remarkable of them are Mr. Colin MacAlpin's
'The Cross and the Crescent,' which won the prize offered by Mr. Charles
Manners in 1903 for an English opera, and Mr. Nicholas Gatty's
'Greysteel,' a very able and musicianly setting of an episode from one
of the Norse sagas, which was produced at Sheffield in 1906.

It is difficult to be sanguine as to the prospects of English opera.
Circumstances are certainly against the production of original work in
this country, though it is legitimate to hope that the recent revival of
interest in Sullivan's works may lead our composers to devote their
energies to the higher forms of comic opera. Anything is better than the
mere imitation of foreign models which has for so long been
characteristic of English opera. By turning to the melodies of his
native land, Weber founded German opera, and if we are ever to have a
school of opera in England we must begin by building upon a similar
foundation.

INDEX OF OPERAS

A Basso Porto (_Spinelli_), 300
Abreise, Die (_D'Albert_), 313
Abu Hassan (_Weber_), 89
Adriana Lecouvreur (_Cilea_), 298
Africaine, L' (_Meyerbeer_), 136
Agrippina (_Handel_), 15
Aida (_Verdi_), 271
Alceste (_Gluck_), 25
Alceste (_Lulli_), 8
Alcina (_Handel_), 56
Alfonso und Estrella (_Schubert_), 104
Almira (_Handel_), 13
Alzira (_Verdi_), 264
Amadis (_Lulli_), 8
Amant Jalou