which Papageno sets the blackamoors
to dancing in "Die Zauberflote"), the orchestra talks of the matronly
renunciation of the princess, enthusiastic Straussians of a musical
parallel with the quintet from Wagner's "Meistersinger," and the opera
comes to an end after three and one-half hours of more or less
unintelligible dialogue poised on waltz melodies.

I have said unintelligible dialogue. For this unintelligibility there
are two reasons-the chief one musical, the other literary. Though
Strauss treats his voices with more consideration in "Der
Rosenkavalier" than in his tragedies, he still so overburdens them that
the words are distinguishable only at intervals. Only too frequently he
crushes them with orchestral voices, which in themselves are not
overwhelming--the voices of his horns, for instance, for which he shows
a particular partiality. His style of declamation is melodic, though it
is only at the end of the opera that he rises to real vocal melody; but
it seems to be put over an orchestral part, and not the orchestral part
put under it. There is no moment in which he can say, as Wagner
truthfully and admiringly said of the wonderful orchestral music of the
third act of "Tristan und Isolde," that all this swelling instrumental
song existed only for the sake of what the dying Tristan was saying
upon his couch. All of Strauss's waltzes seem to exist for their own
sake, which makes the disappointment greater that they are not carried
through in the spirit in which they are begun; that is, the spirit of
the naive Viennese dance tune.

A second reason for the too frequent unintelligibility of the text is
its archaic character. Its idioms are eighteenth century as well as
Viennese, and its persistent use of the third person even among
individuals of quality, though it gives a tang to the libretto when
read in the study, is not welcome when heard with difficulty. Besides
this, there is use of dialect--vulgar when assumed by Octavian, mixed
when called for by such characters as Valzacchi and his partner in
scandal mongery, Annina. To be compelled to forego a knowledge of half
of what such a master of diction as Mr. Reiss was saying was a new
sensation to his admirers who understand German. Yet the fault was as
little his as it was Mr. Goritz's that so much of what he said went for
nothing; it was all his misfortune, including the fact that much of the
music is not adapted to his voice.

The music offers a pleasant