MUSIC NOTES.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Issue 1361, 25 May 1916, Page 34

MUSIC NOTES.

(By

“G” String.)

Handel as an opera writer is curiously unknown to the average music lover, so completely have his oratorios, completed during the last few years of his long life, overshadowed all that went before. Most of Han-

del’s operas were composed in the

“Italian manner,” and were correspondingly tragic or serious in intent. Like Wagner, however, he did make one excursion into the realms of comic opera, but lus “Serse” is not remembered to-day as is Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger.” The memory of “Serse,” nevertheless, is kept alive by virtue of one air it contained. “It is,” says Streat'field in his biography of Handel, “a bustling little work, possibly founded upon a Spanish comedy of intrigue, in which only the names of the characters have anything to do with the classical world. ‘Serse’ is now known chiefly as containing the beautiful air, ‘Ombra Mai Fu,’ which in its modern orchestral ar-

rangement as ‘the celebrated Largo’ is perhaps more popular than anything Handel ever wrote.”

From Italy comes the information that two of the three operas on which Puccini has been working for a longtime are now ready, viz., “Rondine” and “11 Tabaro.” The third work deals with the time of the Italian Renaissance of the fourteenth century. “11 Tabaro” will probably be pioduced in Italy next fall. “Rondine” was contracted for by the Vienna Royal Opera House before the war, and it is stated that Puccini still feels himself bound by that contract. If this is correct, such an attitude might fairly be described as incomprehensible.

This is Sir James Swinburne’s opinion of the organ stop known as the Vox Humana: —“1 could never quite make out why the organ builders made the Vox Humana stop. I think they must have got a sort of third-rate goat and stuck pins into it until it bleated, and then copied the sound! And not content with calling the result the Vox Humana, they added to it a veiy effective imitation of the wobble of the incompetent singer.”

The news comes from Paris of the death of Giovanni Sbriglia, the great Italian tenor and teacher of singing, at the age of 76. He was a Neapolitan, studied at the Naples Conservatoire, made his debut at the San

Carlo, and became the leading operatic tenor of the sixties. He toured the United States of America with Adelina Patti, and later with other artists right down to San Francisco, and won further triumphs in Flavana and Mexico. In later years Sbriglia became very skilful in diagnos.ng the true quality of a voice, and in this way changed Jean de Reszke from a second-rate baritone to the greatest tenor of his generation. He also taught Edouard de Reszke, the basso, and transformed their sister Josephine from a light seprano to a dramatic. His long list of famous pupils includes Madames Nordica and Silyl Sanderson, and the French basso Pol Plancon.