REPORTS FROM THE SECTIONS. 285 
other works, mostly French and Italian. Happy composers when 
such so-called improvements are only made after their deaths, as 
ma case which occurred not long before I left Paris, I remember. 
A certain Madame Hisson, then singing at the Opera, took it into 
that such conduct, especially from the fair sex, on whom it could 
not be returned in kind, left but one course open to the critic, 
which would be to pass them by with merely the observation that, 
as they not only professed to have arrived at perfection and to 
no improvement, but also were ready to assert by the valour 
of their fair hands their being better interpreters than the com- 
posers themselves of great works like “ Der Freischutz,” they 
must clearly be above all criticism. 
To return to our composer’s miseries. The stars restored to 
good humour, he has next to run the gauntlet of the manager— 
the interpreter of public taste ; and if his energy or diplomacy 
has saved his work from some of the vandalism of the stars, it is to be 
feared it will not hold out against the storming of the director. 
Wagner himself, the despotic Wagner, had to give way when his 
“Tannhiiuser” was rehearsed in Paris. In his own account of 
that unfortunate affair, he confesses he was obliged to modify his 
work in order to make room for a ballet, without which, he says, 
no opera there can succeed. It is true that the great tone-poet 
has long done with this mild spirit of condescension. Now, he 
not only imposes his own conceptions without suffering the very 
slightest modification, or the hint of such a possibility, but he for- 
bids the audience to give any mark, even of approval, before the 
close of the act. It is related also of him that when, at the close 
of the Bayreuth festival, all the chief performers were clamorously 
ited, ing personality takin, 
alarm, he tyrannically forbade their obeying, and he made his 
@ppearance all alone before the public. 
_Well, it is not every composer, even though popular, who can 
ord thus to fe be sop, aa cou Sager 
afford on his dignit posers th 
general know well what it is to pass under the caudine forks 
ial tyranny ; moreover, during the rehearsals there are 
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