ful
imaginative back-drop is infinitely more stimulating to a performance.
Of course, there are places where it cannot be used. If the scene is
laid in a Childs' restaurant a back-drop might perhaps be comic to a
mind not yet used to making its own pictures; but I hope and believe the
aim is towards simplicity in this direction; but the simplicity must be
carried out by artists, and first-rate ones. Who, who has seen the
leaping figures of the Russian Ballet in "Prince Igor," has felt a lack
on the scenic side because the tents with their feather of smoke were
suggested on a flat back-drop? Who longed for real, that is, one-side
real, tents--with steam escaping from a semi-hidden pipe through the
top? The luridness was suggested by colour far more skilfully than if
rocks, thinly swaying and lit by red lights, had cluttered up the wings.
Make the audience do the thinking, blend stimulation with simulation,
and if your artist has been a true one no one will cry for flapping
pillars, or crumpled leaves on a net.

"Boris Goudonow," as it used to be given at the Metropolitan, is a good
example of what real artist vision can do with colour. Those who saw
those figures in brilliant green, kneeling with their backs to the
audience, barring off the procession scene, while the towering minaret
of the cathedral carried the eye up and up at the back, will surely
never forget the light and shade grouping. It has since, I am sorry to
say, lost some of its skilful arrangement, which I suppose is
unavoidable, but the performance is still homogeneous and a unit, as to
_decors,_ score and costumes.

It was on the Kaiser's birthday that we saw "Corfu," and afterwards we
went to the newly-opened Hotel Esplanade for supper. I have never seen
such a sight. All imaginable uniforms were there, on all types of
officers and foreign diplomats. Some looked magnificently romantic, and
some as if they had stepped from the comic opera stage. The women, as
usual in Germany, though plentifully be-jewelled, looked dull and
inadequate beside the men.

One summer night in Berlin, we went to Max Reinhardt's small theatre,
the Kammerspiel, to see "Fruehlingserwachen." My dear friend, Oscar
Saenger, was in town, and I had happened to see him in a box at the
opera the evening before. He had come to see Berger, the giant baritone
whom he had transformed into a tenor, in his first performance of
_Siegmund_. I think Putnam Griswold, that splendid type of the