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ves fortunate in not being thrown after them." Is there a cooking theme in _Siegfried_ to describe Mime's brewing? Lavignac and others, who have listed the _Ring motive_, have neglected to catalogue it, but it is mentioned by Old Fogy. Practically a whole act is taken up in _Louise_ with the preparation for and consumption of a dinner. Scarpia eats in _Tosca_ and the heroine kills him with a table knife. There is much talk of food in _Hansel und Gretel_ and there is a supper in _The Merry Wives of Windsor_. There are drinking songs in _Don Giovanni_, _Lucrezia Borgia_, _Hamlet_, _La Traviata_, _Girofle-Girofla_.... The reference to whiskey and soda in _Madama Butterfly_ is celebrated. J. E. Cox, the author of "Musical Recollections," describes Herr Pischek in the supper scene of _Don Giovanni_ as "out-heroding Herod by swallowing glass after glass of champagne like a sot, and gnawing the drumstick of a fowl, which he held across his mouth with his fingers, just as any of his own middle-class countrymen may be seen any day of the week all the year round at the _mit-tag_ or _abend-essen_ feeding at one of their largely frequented _tables-d'hote_." Eating or drinking on the stage is always fraught with danger, as Charles Santley once discovered during Papageno's supper scene in _The Magic Flute_: "The supper which Tamino commands for the hungry Papageno consisted of pasteboard imitations of good things, but the cup contained real wine, a small draught of which I found refreshing on a hot night in July, amid the dust and heat of the stage. On the occasion in question I was putting the cup to lips, when I heard somebody call to me from the wings; I felt very angry at the interruption, and was just about to swallow the wine when I heard an anxious call not to drink. Suspecting something was wrong, I pretended to drink, and deposited the cup on the table. Immediately after the scene I made inquiries about the reason for the caution I received, and was informed that as each night the carpenters, who had no right to it, finished what remained of the wine before the property men, whose perquisite it was, could lay hold of the cup, the latter, to give their despoilers a lesson, had mingled castor-oil with my drink!" A young husband of my acquaintance once bemoaned to me the fact that his wife seemed destined to become a great singer. "She is such a remarkable cook!" he explained to account for his despondency. I reassured him
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