Nuova,"
First performance in America of "I Giojelli,"

CHAPTER I

BIBLICAL OPERAS

Whether or not the English owe a grudge to their Lord Chamberlain for
depriving them of the pleasure of seeing operas based on Biblical
stories I do not know. If they do, the grudge cannot be a deep one, for
it is a long time since Biblical operas were in vogue, and in the case
of the very few survivals it has been easy to solve the difficulty and
salve the conscience of the public censor by the simple device of
changing the names of the characters and the scene of action if the
works are to be presented on the stage, or omitting scenery, costumes
and action and performing them as oratorios. In either case, whenever
this has been done, however, it has been the habit of critics to make
merry at the expense of my Lord Chamberlain and the puritanicalness of
the popular spirit of which he is supposed to be the official
embodiment, and to discourse lugubriously and mayhap profoundly on the
perversion of composers' purposes and the loss of things essential to
the lyric drama.

It may be heretical to say so, but is it not possible that Lord
Chamberlain and Critic have both taken too serious a view of the
matter? There is a vast amount of admirable material in the Bible
(historical, legendary or mythical, as one happens to regard it), which
would not necessarily be degraded by dramatic treatment, and which
might be made entertaining as well as edifying, as it has been made in
the past, by stage representation. Reverence for this material is
neither inculcated nor preserved by shifting the scene and throwing a
veil over names too transparent to effect a disguise. Moreover, when
this is done, there is always danger that the process may involve a
sacrifice of the respect to which a work of art is entitled on its
merits as such. Gounod, in collaboration with Barbier and Carre, wrote
an opera entitled "La Reine de Saba." The plot had nothing to do with
the Bible beyond the name of Sheba's Queen and King Solomon. Mr.
Farnie, who used to make comic operetta books in London, adapted the
French libretto for performance in English and called the opera
"Irene." What a title for a grand opera! Why not "Blanche" or
"Arabella"? No doubt such a thought flitted through many a careless
mind unconscious that an Irene was a Byzantine Empress of the eighth
century, who, by her devotion to its tenets, won beatification after
death from the Greek Church.