tent be glorious summer" ere long. Boston, for its best music,—best in artistic tendency, though not perhaps the most exciting or most fashionable,—has always relied more than New York on its own quiet, domestic resources. Our musical societies have been the centres of our musical activity, and have more or less successfully provided us with sterling opportunities of making ourselves acquainted with the master compositions in the various forms of Oratorio, Orchestra, Chamber Music, etc., where the end has been more to get at the intrinsic worth and beauty of the music, than to go into fashionable raptures about some new-come singer or solo-playing virtuoso. Yet virtuosodom and the Italian opera come in to reap an annual harvest here too, and have and long will have their zealous party of admirers. Were Opera an organized home industry among us, as much as other forms of music,—were there some meaning in the name "Academy of Music" worn by operatic theatres, it would be more useful to our artistic progress. But Italian Opera, as managed, and "star" concerts generally, are no part of the healthy, permanent development of our own musical resources. They are speculations; they attack us from without, exploiting a factitious enthusiasm, and exhausting the soil in one short season, so they may only carry off the present fatness of the land. Operas and virtuoso concerts are wholly in the hands of speculators, musical Jew-brokers, who do a formidable business in old clothes, the worn-out musical celebrities of Europe;—often with great skill, often much to our pleasure and advantage; for it is much to us to hear great artists, even when the voice has lost some of its freshness, and to admire now what long ago perhaps exhausted admiration in the Old World. But the effect is bad on our domestic industry. We almost need a musical protective system. Our good old society concerts have been much thrown out of joint. Few of them of late, as compared with former years, have paid. The dazzling novelties, that come trumpeted with all the cunning speculators' arts, debauch us somewhat from our wholesome, quiet love of pure, high music for its own sake, and lead the public into little short-lived fanaticisms about certain prima donnas, baritones, or tenors, and about music chiefly made to show off the singer, full of the commonplaces that he loves to make "effect" in,—fanaticisms alternating with blasé indifference. But this would lead us into a long discussion, and it is our wish here to avoid vexed questions. For the present we will avow no sides, of German or Italian, "light" or "classical."
The lovers of opera have something to look forward to in Boston; what, we shall see when we survey the field elsewhere. Our noble Boston theatre must needs be one point in the triangular campaign of the three cities. And here we may allude, en passant, to the prospect of one novelty that ought to interest our opera-lovers who are weary of the usual hackneyed répertoire. Our townsman, Mr. L. H. Southard, the composer of "The Scarlet Letter," has also written an Italian opera, on an Oriental subject, with the title "Omano," the libretto by Signor Manetta, founded on Beckford's "Vathek." A private or subscription concert will soon give an opportunity of hearing some of its scenas, quatuors, etc. To come back, then, to what is more peculiarly Bostonian in the way of music,—what concerts shall we have? Of large societies, the only one remaining now in operative force is the oldest and the largest, the Handel and Haydn Society. This set the right example last May, in that splendid three-days' Festival, of true domestic musical enterprise, organizing the whole thing on the basis of internal and domestic means, with our own permanent nucleus of orchestra and chorus, and drawing from without such other talent, such solo singers, as were needed for the right interpretation of the noble music, and not merely for their own private exhibition and profit. This was genuine; this was wholesome; and the success warrants the best hopes for another season. Carl Zerrahn, the excellent conductor upon that occasion, is on his way home from Germany (his old home) with new stock of zeal and of new music, and the oratorio rehearsals will at once begin. It is event enough for one winter, the single fact that Handel's "Israel in Egypt," that mightiest oratorio, which is one mountain range of sublime choruses, will be the chief subject of study.
