which
Napoleon, his marshal Lefebvre, and a laundress were the principal
figures. Whether or not the great Corsican could be justified as a
character in a lyric drama was a mooted question when Giordano
conceived the idea of making an opera out of the play. It is said that
Verdi remarked something to the effect that the question depended upon
what he would be called upon to sing, and how he would be expected to
sing it. The problem was really not a very large or difficult one, for
all great people are turned into marionettes when transformed into
operatic heroes.

In the palmy days of bel canto no one would have raised the question at
all, for then the greatest characters in history moved about the stage
in stately robes and sang conventional arias in the conventional
manner. The change from old-fashioned opera to regenerated lyric drama
might have simplified the problem for Giordano, even if his librettist
had not already done so by reducing Napoleon to his lowest terms from a
dramatic as well as historical point of view. The heroes of
eighteenth-century opera were generally feeble-minded lovers and
nothing more; Giordano's Napoleon is only a jealous husband who helps
out in the denouement of a play which is concerned chiefly with other
people.

In turning Sardou's dramatic personages into operatic puppets a great
deal of bloodletting was necessary and a great deal of the
characteristic charm of the comedy was lost, especially in the cases of
Madame Sans-Gene herself and Napoleon's sister; but enough was left to
make a practicable opera. There were the pictures of all the plebeians
who became great folk later concerned in the historical incidents which
lifted them up. There were also the contrasted pictures which resulted
from the great transformation, and it was also the ingratiating
incident of the devotion of Lefebvre to the stout-hearted, honest
little woman of the people who had to try to be a duchess. All this was
fair operatic material, though music has a strange capacity for
refining stage characters as well as for making them colorless.
Giordano could not do himself justice as a composer without refining
the expression of Caterina Huebscher, and so his Duchess of Dantzic
talks a musical language at least which Sardou's washerwoman could not
talk and remain within the dramatic verities. Therefore we have "Madame
Sans-Gene" with a difference, but not one that gave any more offence
than operatic treatment of