t is shown by an extract from
a private letter written by Liszt at Milan. Speaking of the famous
Scala Opera House, he says: "In this blessed land putting a serious
opera on the stage is not at all a serious thing. A fortnight is
generally time enough. The musicians of the orchestra, and the
singers, who are generally strangers to each other and get no
encouragement from the audience (the latter are generally either
chatting or sleeping--in the fifth box they either sup or play cards),
assemble inattentive, insensible, and troubled with catarrh, not as
artists, but as people who are paid for the music they make. There is
nothing more icy than these Italian representations. No trace of
_nuances_, in spite of the exaggeration of accent and gesture dictated
by Italian taste, much less any effect _d'ensemble_. Each artist
thinks only of himself, without troubling his thoughts about his
neighbor. Why worry one's self for a public that does not even
listen?"

In German opera, on the other hand, the orchestral part and the
choruses and declamatory sections are just as important as the lyric
numbers, and many of the most exquisite passages in the operas of
Weber and Wagner are a kind of superior pantomime music during which
no voice at all is heard on the stage. Now I am convinced that much of
the talking in opera-boxes is simply due to ignorance of this fact.
Vocal music is much more readily appreciated than instrumental music,
and those who have no ear for orchestral measures do not realize that
others are enraptured by them. Hence they talk as soon as the singing
ceases, unconscious of the fact that they are greatly annoying those
who wish to listen to the orchestra.

To a large extent the stupid custom of having music between the acts
at theatres is responsible for the talking at the opera. For between
the acts everybody, of course, wants to talk; and since at the theatre
the orchestra merely furnishes a sort of background or support for the
conversation, people naturally come to look upon the overtures and
interludes and introductions to the second and third acts of an opera
in similar light. Even if _entr'acte_ music in theatres were much
better than it is commonly, this consideration alone ought to suffice
to banish it from the theatres. It degrades the art and spoils the
public.

Those of the stockholders of the Metropolitan Opera House who indulge
in loud conversation while the music goes on, or who rent their boxe