er all, so vast an improvement on Donizetti and Bellini.
His melodies are too often sadly sentimental, and any freshness with
which he may have endowed them has long since faded. True, they
occasionally have a terseness and pungency, a sheer brute force, which
those other composers never got into their insipid tunes; while, on
the other hand, Verdi rarely shows his strength without also showing a
degree of vulgarity from which Bellini and Donizetti were for the most
part free.

"Aida" is a different matter, though not so very different a matter.
Here we have the young Verdi--Verdi in his early prime, for he was
only fifty-eight; here also we have a story more likely to stir his
rowdy imagination, if not more susceptible of effective treatment in
the young Verdi manner. The misfortune is that the book is a very
excerebrose affair. The drama does not begin until the third act: the
two first are yawning abysms of sheer dulness. Who wants to _see_
that Radames loves Aida, that Amneris, the king's daughter, loves
Radames, that Aida, a slave, is the daughter of the King of the
Ethiopians, that Radames goes on a war expedition against that king,
beats him and fetches him back a prisoner, that the other king gives
Radames his daughter in marriage, that Radames, highly honoured, yet
wishes to goodness he could get out of it somehow? A master of drama
would begin in the third act, reveal the whole past in a pregnant five
minutes, and then hold us breathless while we watched to see whether
Radames would yield to social pressure, marry Amneris, and throw over
Aida, or yield to passion, fly with Aida, and throw over his country.
All this shows the bad influence of Scribe, who usually spent half his
books in explaining matters as simple and obvious as the reason for
eating one's breakfast. Verdi knew this as well as anyone, and used
the two first acts as opportunities for stage display. For "Aida" was
written to please the Khedive of Egypt; and Verdi, always keenly
commercial, probably knew his man. Now, when the masters of
opera--Handel, Gluck, Mozart, Weber--got hold of a bad book, they
nearly invariably "faked" it by getting swiftly over the weak points
and dwelling on the strong; and, above all, they flooded the whole
thing with a stream of delicious melody that hypnotises one, and for
the time puts fault-finding out of the question. Not so Verdi. He
wrote to please his audience, and he knew that what one can only call
dark-skin