arnier, instead of reproducing exactly the placing of the orchestra
in the old Opera, managed so well in the new one that they are unable to
put in the six harps of old or the four drums with which Meyerbeer got
such surprising effects in _Robert_ and _Le Prophete_. I believe,
however, that recent improvements have averted this disaster in a
certain measure, and that there is now a place for the drums. But we
shall never hear the six harps again.

We must say something of the genesis of Meyerbeer's works, for in many
instances this was curious and few people know about it.

II

We might like to see works spring from the author's brain as complete as
Minerva was when she sprang from Jove's, but that is infrequently the
case. When we study the long series of operas which Gluck wrote, we are
surprised to meet some things which we recognize as having seen before
in the masterpieces which immortalize his name. And often the music is
adapted to entirely different situations in the changed form. The words
of a follower become the awesome prophecy of a high priest. The trio in
_Orphee_ with its tender love and expressions of perfect happiness
fairly trembles with accents of sorrow. The music had been written for
an entirely different situation which justified them. Massenet has told
us that he borrowed right and left from his unpublished score, _La Coupe
du Roi de Thule_. That is what Gluck did with his _Elena e Paride_ which
had little success. I may as well confess that one of the ballets in
_Henry VIII_ came from the finale of an opera-comique in one act. This
work was finished and ready to go to rehearsal when the whole thing was
stopped because I had the audacity to assert to Nestor Roqueplan, the
director of Favart Hall, that Mozart's _Le Nozze di Figaro_ was a
masterpiece.

Meyerbeer, even more than anyone, tried not to lose his ideas and the
study of their transformation is extremely interesting. One day Nuitter,
the archivist at the Opera, learned of an important sale of manuscripts
in Berlin. He attended the sale and brought back a lot of Meyerbeer's
rough drafts which included studies for a _Faust_ that the author never
finished. These fragments give no idea what the piece would have been.
We see Faust and Mephistopheles walking in Hell. They come to the Tree
of Human Knowledge on the banks of the Styx and Faust picks the fruit.
From this detail it is easy to imagine that the libretto is bizarre.
The authorship