They came to two hundred and twenty-eight.]
In spite of the changes of taste and the campaign of the press, the
Opera has remained to this day as it was in the time of Meyerbeer and
Gounod and their disciples. But it would be foolish to pretend that it
has not its public. The receipts show well enough that _Faust_ is in
greater favour than _Siegfried_ or _Tristan_, not to speak of the more
recent works of the new French school, which cannot be acclimatised
there.
Without doubt, the enormous stage at the Opera does not lend itself well
to modern musical dramas, which are intimate and concentrated, and would
be lost in its immense space, which is more adapted for formal
processions like the marches in the _Prophete_ and _Aida_. Besides this,
there is the conventional acting of the majority of the singers, the
dull lifelessness of the choruses, the defective acoustics, and the
exaggerated utterance and gestures of the actors, demanded by the great
dimensions of the place--all of which is a serious obstacle to the
conception of a living and simple art. But the chief obstacle will
always lie in the very nature of such a theatre--a theatre of luxury and
vanity, created for a set of snobs, whose least interest is the music,
who have not enough intellect to create a fashion, but who servilely
follow every fashion after it is thirty years old.
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