milarity of its
inner nature and unity in development."[D]

[Sidenote: _The Czardas._]

The basis of Liszt's Rhapsodies being thus distinctively national, he
has in a manner imitated in their character and tempo the dual
character of the Hungarian national dance, the Czardas, which consists
of two movements, a _Lassu_, or slow movement, followed by a _Friss_.
These alternate at the will of the dancer, who gives a sign to the
band when he wishes to change from one to the other.

FOOTNOTES:

[D] Weitzmann, "Geschichte des Clavierspiels," p. 197.

VII

_At the Opera_

[Sidenote: _Instability of taste._]

[Sidenote: _The age of operas._]

Popular taste in respect of the opera is curiously unstable. It is
surprising that the canons of judgment touching it have such feeble
and fleeting authority in view of the popularity of the art-form and
the despotic hold which it has had on fashion for two centuries. No
form of popular entertainment is acclaimed so enthusiastically as a
new opera by an admired composer; none forgotten so quickly. For the
spoken drama we go back to Shakespeare in the vernacular, and, on
occasions, we revive the masterpieces of the Attic poets who
flourished more than two millenniums ago; but for opera we are bounded
by less than a century, unless occasional performances of Gluck's
"Orfeo" and Mozart's "Figaro," "Don Giovanni," and "Magic Flute" be
counted as submissions to popular demand, which, unhappily, we know
they are not. There is no one who has attended the opera for
twenty-five years who might not bewail the loss of operas from the
current list which appealed to his younger fancy as works of real
loveliness. In the season of 1895-96 the audiences at the Metropolitan
Opera House in New York heard twenty-six different operas. The oldest
were Gluck's "Orfeo" and Beethoven's "Fidelio," which had a single
experimental representation each. After them in seniority came
Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor," which is sixty-one years old, and
has overpassed the average age of "immortal" operas by from ten to
twenty years, assuming Dr. Hanslick's calculation to be correct.

[Sidenote: _Decimation of the operatic list._]

[Sidenote: _Dependence on singers._]

The composers who wrote operas for the generation that witnessed
Adelina Patti's _debut_ at the Academy of Music, in New York, were
Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, and Meyerbeer. Thanks to his progressive
genius, Verdi is still alive