t)
Varlaam....................... ....Andrea de Segurola
Missail............................... Pietro Audisio
The Innkeeper........................ Jeanne Maubourg
The Simpleton............................Albert Reiss
A Police Officer.........................Giulio Rossi
A Court Officer..................... Leopoldo Mariani
Lovitzky......).Two Jesuits..........( V. Reschiglian
Tcerniakowsky,) ( Louis Kreidler

Conductor: Arturo Toscanini

CHAPTER XVI

"MADAME SANS-GENE" AND OTHER OPERAS BY GIORDANO

The opera-goers of New York enjoyed a novel experience when Giordano's
"Madame Sans-Gene" had its first performance on any stage in their
presence at the Metropolitan Opera House on January 25, 1915. It was
the first time that a royal and imperial personage who may be said to
live freshly and vividly in the minds of the people of this generation
as well as in their imaginations appeared before them to sing his
thoughts and feelings in operatic fashion. At first blush it seemed as
if a singing Bonaparte was better calculated to stir their risibilities
than their interest or sympathies; and this may, indeed, have been the
case; but at any rate they had an opportunity to make the acquaintance
of Napoleon before he rose to imperial estate. But, in all seriousness,
it is easier to imagine the figure which William II of Germany would
cut on the operatic stage than the "grand, gloomy, and peculiar"
Corsican. The royal people with whom the operatic public is familiar as
a rule are sufficiently surrounded by the mists of antiquity and
obscurity that the contemplation of them arouse little thought of the
incongruity which their appearance as operatic heroes ought to create.
Henry the Fowler in "Lohengrin," Mark in "Tristan und Isolde," the
unnumbered Pharaoh in "Aida," Herod in "Salome" and "Herodiade," and
the few other kings, if there are any more with whom the present
generation of opera-goers have a personal acquaintance, so to speak,
are more or less merely poetical creations whom we seldom if ever think
of in connection with veritable history. Even Boris Godounoff is to us
more a picture out of a book, like the Macbeth whom he so strongly
resembles from a theatrical point of view, than the monarch who had a
large part in the making of the Russian people. The Roman censorship
prevented us long ago from making the acquaintance of the Gustavus of
Sweden whom Ankerstrom stabbed t