aside this intellectual activity, we
shall deprive ourselves, among other things, of the
pleasures which it is the province of memory to give; and
the exercise of memory is called for by music much more
urgently than by any other art, because of its volatile
nature and the role which repetition plays in it."

FOOTNOTES:

[E] "But no real student can have studied the score deeply, or
listened discriminatingly to a good performance, without discovering
that there is a tremendous chasm between the conventional aims of the
Italian poet in the book of the opera and the work which emerged from
the composer's profound imagination. Da Ponte contemplated a _dramma
giocoso_; Mozart humored him until his imagination came within the
shadow cast before by the catastrophe, and then he transformed the
poet's comedy into a tragedy of crushing power. The climax of Da
Ponte's ideal is reached in a picture of the dissolute _Don_ wrestling
in idle desperation with a host of spectacular devils, and finally
disappearing through a trap, while fire bursts out on all sides, the
thunders roll, and _Leporello_ gazes on the scene, crouched in a comic
attitude of terror, under the table. Such a picture satisfied the
tastes of the public of his time, and that public found nothing
incongruous in a return to the scene immediately afterward of all the
characters save the reprobate, who had gone to his reward, to hear a
description of the catastrophe from the buffoon under the table, and
platitudinously to moralize that the perfidious wretch, having been
stored away safely in the realm of Pluto and Proserpine, nothing
remained for them to do except to raise their voices in the words of
the "old song,"

_"Questo e il fin di chi fa mal:
E dei perfidi la morte
Alla vita e sempre ugual."_

"New York Musical Season, 1889-90."

[F] "Review of the New York Musical Season, 1889-90," p. 75.

[G] See "Studies in the Wagnerian Drama," chapter I.

VIII

_Choirs and Choral Music_

[Sidenote: _Choirs a touchstone of culture._]

[Sidenote: _The value of choir singing._]

No one would go far astray who should estimate the extent and
sincerity of a community's musical culture by the number of its chorus
singers. Some years ago it was said that over three hundred cities and
towns in Germany contained singing societies and orchestras devoted to
the cultivation of choral music. In the United States, where there a