Agamemnon. When Paul Dukas's lyric drama, Ariane et Barbe-Bleue, was produced at the Metropolitan Opera House, the reviewers, almost to a man, referred to the song of the wives, which floats out of the cellar of the castle when Ariane opens the forbidden door in the first act, as a Brittany folksong. So it may very well be; I believe, indeed, that Dukas has said that it was. However, I am informed on excellent authority that he composed it himself! It has, to be sure, a folksong air, and it is interesting to catch its resemblance to the Berceuse of the Princess of the Sea in Rimsky-Korsakoff's opera, Sadko, and to the old Spanish tune, known to us as Flee as a Bird. La jambe de bois, borrowed by Stravinsky for an effect in the first scene of Petrouchka, might be a folksong, but it is not. It is a popular French air. "When Elgar used a genuine Welsh folksong in his Introduction and Allegro for Strings, a well-known London critic, a prominent member of the Folksong Society, declared it to be a poor imitation of the folk-style," writes Ernest Newman. "When the legend got about that a certain melody in in the South was an Italian folksong, the same critic recognized the genuine folk-quality in it, and it was distinctly unfortunate for him that the melody happened to be Elgar's own invention from first to last."
Thus it happens that while many composers,
