o death at a masked ball, by
transmogrifying him into the absurdly impossible figure of a Governor
of Boston; and the Claudius of Ambroise Thomas's opera is as much a
ghost as Hamlet's father, while Debussy's blind King is as much an
abstraction as is Melisande herself.

Operatic dukes we know in plenty, though most of them have come out of
the pages of romance and are more or less acceptable according to the
vocal ability of their representatives. When Caruso sings "La donna e
mobile" we care little for the profligacy of Verdi's Duke of Mantua and
do not inquire whether or not such an individual ever lived.
Moussorgsky's Czar Boris ought to interest us more, however. The great
bell-tower in the Kremlin which he built, and the great bell--a
shattered monument of one of his futile ambitions--have been seen by
thousands of travellers who never took the trouble to learn that the
tyrant who had the bell cast laid a serfdom upon the Russian people
which endured down to our day. Boris, by the way, picturesque and
dramatic figure that he is as presented to us in history, never got
upon the operatic stage until Moussorgsky took him in hand. Two hundred
years ago a great German musician, Mattheson, as much scholar as
composer if not more, set him to music, but the opera was never
performed. Peter the Great, who came a century after Boris, lived a
life more calculated to invite the attention of opera writers, but even
he escaped the clutches of dramatic composers except Lortzing, who took
advantage of the romantic episode of Peter's service as ship carpenter
in Holland to make him the hero of one of the most sparkling of German
comic operas. Lortzing had a successor in the Irishman T. S. Cooke, but
his opera found its way into the limbo of forgotten things more than a
generation ago, while Lortzing's still lives on the stage of Germany.
Peter deserved to be celebrated in music, for it was in his reign that
polyphonic music, albeit of the Italian order, was introduced into the
Russian church and modern instrumental music effected an entrance into
his empire. But I doubt if Peter was sincerely musical; in his youth he
heard only music of the rudest kind. He was partial to the bagpipes
and, like Nero, played upon that instrument.

To come back to Bonaparte and music. "Madame Sans-Gene" is an operatic
version of the drama which Sardou developed out of a little one-act
play dealing with a partly fictitious, partly historical story in