much I do want to hear it once! At least I want to today. In 1926, when Gatti-Casazza at last mounts Simone Boccanegra at the Metropolitan Opera House I shall probably go to bed entirely ignorant of that fact. Curiosity and desire will be equally dead, in all likelihood, so far as Cornelius's The Barber of Bagdad, Nicolai's The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini are concerned, when the time arrives when it will be easy for me to satisfy this curiosity and desire.
The case with modern music is no better. It is just as difficult to gratify an ambition to hear Dukas's Ariane et Barbe-Bleue as it is to hear Offenbach's Barbe-Bleue. The Boston Symphony Orchestra will no doubt perform Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin on the night when I am hungry for the Rapsodie Espagnole, and Bodanzky will provide this last delight on the evening I have begged providence to send me Daphnis et Chloë. This is all assuredly music in the modern French idiom, although Erik Satie has said, "Ravel has refused the Legion of Honour, but all his music accepts it," and we know that in ten years this epigram will become a platitude. Lately, we have heard a good deal from the modern Italians, Respighi and Malipiero, but I wanted to hear them two years ago.
On the whole, it is amazing that anybody ever
