The opera failed on the Continent as well
as in London, but if it had not been given a comic operetta flavor by
its title and association with the name of the excellent Mr. Farnie,
would the change in supposed time, place and people have harmed it?

A few years ago I read (with amusement, of course) of the metamorphosis
to which Massenet's "Herodiade" was subjected so that it might
masquerade for a brief space on the London stage; but when I saw the
opera in New York "in the original package" (to speak commercially), I
could well believe that the music sounded the same in London, though
John the Baptist sang under an alias and the painted scenes were
supposed to delineate Ethiopia instead of Palestine.

There is a good deal of nonsensical affectation in the talk about the
intimate association in the minds of composers of music, text,
incident, and original purpose. "Un Ballo in Maschera," as we see it
most often nowadays, plays in Nomansland; but I fancy that its music
would sound pretty much the same if the theatre of action were
transplanted back to Sweden, whence it came originally, or left in
Naples, whither it emigrated, or in Boston, to which highly
inappropriate place it was banished to oblige the Neapolitan censor. So
long as composers have the habit of plucking feathers out of their dead
birds to make wings for their new, we are likely to remain in happy and
contented ignorance of mesalliances between music and score, until they
are pointed out by too curious critics or confessed by the author. What
is present habit was former custom to which no kind or degree of stigma
attached. Bach did it; Handel did it; nor was either of these worthies
always scrupulous in distinguishing between meum and tuum when it came
to appropriating existing thematic material. In their day the merit of
individuality and the right of property lay more in the manner in which
ideas were presented than in the ideas themselves.

In 1886 I spent a delightful day with Dr. Chrysander at his home in
Bergedorf, near Hamburg, and he told me the story of how on one
occasion, when Keiser was incapacitated by the vice to which he was
habitually prone, Handel, who sat in his orchestra, was asked by him to
write the necessary opera. Handel complied, and his success was too
great to leave Keiser's mind in peace. So he reset the book. Before
Keiser's setting was ready for production Handel had gone to Italy.
Hearing of Keiser's act, he secured a cop