as established until he has appeared in
London and received its award of merit; and whatever good things may be
going in other continental cities we know that, with the least possible
waste of time, those good things will be submitted to us for our sealing
judgment. There is only one other city in the world which has so firm a
grip on the music of the hour, and that is Buenos Ayres.

Let the superior persons, like Mr. Oscar Hammerstein, who says that
London is not musical, because it sniffs at Schonberg, and doesn't get
excited over the dead meat of Rossini, Auber, and Bellini, pay a visit
any night to Queen's Hall during the Promenade Season. Where are the
empty seats? In the five-shilling tier. Where is the hall packed to
suffocation? In the shilling promenade. In the promenade there are seats
for about one hundred, and room for about seven hundred. That means that
six hundred Londoners stand, close-packed, with hardly room for a change
of posture and in an atmosphere overcharged with heat and sound, for two
hours and a half, listening, not to the inanities of Sullivan or
Offenbach or Arditi, but to Weber, Palestrina, Debussy, Tchaikowsky,
Wieniawski, Chopin, Mozart, Handel, and even the starch-stiff Bach.

Personally I prefer the sugar and spice of Italian Opera. I know it is
an execrable taste, but as I am a most commonplace person I cannot help
myself. I have loved it since childhood, when the dull pages of my
Violin Tutor were lit by crystalline fragments of Cherubini and
Donizetti, and when the house in which I lived was chattering day and
night Italianate melody. One of my earliest recollections is of hearing,
as a tiny thing in petticoats, the tedious noises of the professional
musician, and the E A D G of the fiddle was the accompaniment to all my
games. From noon until seven in the evening I played amid the squeak of
the fiddle, the chant of the 'cello, the solemn throb of the double
bass, and the querulous wail of flute and piccolo; and always the music
was the music of Italy, for these elders worked in operatic orchestras.
So I learned to love it, and especially do I still love the
moderns--Leoncavallo, Wolf-Ferrari, Mascagni, Puccini--for it was in "La
Boheme" that I heard both Caruso and grand opera for the first time; and
whenever I now hear "Che gelida manina," even badly sung, I always want
to sit down and have a good cry. It reminds me of a pale office-boy of
fifteen, who had to hoard his pence for a