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Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces
Copyright, 1911, by Doubleday, Page & Company
Printed in the United States at the Country Life Press, Garden City, N.Y.
In selecting a few of the operas every child should know, the editor's greatest difficulty is in determining what to leave out. The wish to include "L'Africaine," "Othello," "Lucia," "Don Pasquale," "Mignon," "Nozze di Figaro," "Don Giovanni," "Rienzi," "Tannhäuser," "Romeo and Juliet," "Parsifal," "Freischütz," and a hundred others makes one impatient of limitations.
The operas described here are not all great compositions: Some of them are hopelessly poor. Those of Balfe and Flotow are included because they were expressions of popular taste when our grandfathers enjoyed going to the opera.
The Nibelung Ring is used in preference to several other compositions of Wagner because the four operas included in it are the fullest both of musical and story wonders, and are at the same time the least understood.
"Aïda" and "Carmen" belong here--as do many which are left out--because of their beauty and musical splendour. Few, instead of many, operas have been written about in this book, because it seemed better to give a complete idea of several than a superficial sketch of many.
The beginnings of opera--music-drama--are unknown; but Sulpitius, an Italian, declared that opera was heard in Italy as early as 1490. The Greeks, of course, accompanied their tragedies with music long before that time, but that would not imply "opera" as we understand it. However, modern opera is doubtless merely the development of that manner of presenting drama.
After the opera, came the ballet, and that belonged distinctively to France. Before 1681 there were no women dancers in the ballet--only males. All ballets of shepherdesses and nymphs and dryads were represented by men and boys; but at last, the ladies of the court of France took to the ballet for their own amusement, and thus women dancers became the fashion.