This was a little Italian opera season, but a successful one, and one housed at the Metropolitan. In the fall there had been another at the Academy of Music, which was not a success, and which ended in a quarrel between prima donna and manager that contributed a significant item to the popular knowledge of the status of Italian opera. On October 18th an Italian named Angelo began a season of Italian opera at the Academy. The name of the company was the Angelo Grand Italian Opera Company, and its manager's experience had been made, as an underling of Mapleson in the luggage department. The season, as projected, was to last five weeks, and a virtue proclaimed in the list was to be a departure from the hurdy-gurdy list which had been doing service so long. There were smiles among the knowing that a trunk despatcher should appear as the successor of his former employer, and that employer so polished a man of the world as James H. Mapleson; but opera makes strange bedfellows, and there have been stranger things than this in its history. A Hebrew boy named Pohl was little more than a bootblack when he entered the service of Maurice Strakosch, but as Herr Pollini a couple of decades later he was a partner of that elegant gentleman and experienced impresario, and one of the operatic dictators of Germany. Eventually, in the case of the Angelo Grand Italian Opera Company, it turned out that the Deus ex machina was the prima donna, Giulia Valda (Miss Julia Wheelock), an American singer, who had chosen this means of getting a hearing in her native land. The list of operas sounded like an echo of half a century before. Five operas were given, and four of them were by Verdi: "Luisa Miller," "I Lombardi," "Un Ballo in Maschera," and "I due Foscari;" the remaining opera was Petrella's "Ione." Here was an escape from the threadbare with a vengeance. It made the critics rub their eyes and wonder if Mme. Valda had not been in the company of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. Five weeks were projected, but trouble came at the end of a fortnight--that is to say, it came to public notice at the end of a fortnight; it began probably with the season. On November 3d the persons who came to hear a promised performance of "La Juive" found the doors of the Academy closed. A few spasmodic efforts to galvanize the corpse into the semblance of life were made, but in vain; the Angelo Grand Italian Opera Company was dead. Some of its members had been heard before in other organizations; some were heard later. They were Giulia Valda, Mlle. Prandi, Mme. Valerga, Mlle. Corre, Mathilde Ricci, Mme. Mestress, Mme. Bianchi-Montaldo, Signor Vicini, Lalloni, Bologna, Greco, Giannini, Pinto, Corsi, Migliara, and Conti. The conductors were Logheder and Bimboni, the latter of whom was discovered as a young conductor of surprising merit twenty years later by Boston.