lively imaginations, as I have said in one of my books, ["A Book of
Operas," p. 9] have rhapsodized on its appositeness, and professed
to hear in it the whispered plottings of the lovers and the merry
raillery of Rosina contrasted with the futile ragings of her grouty
guardian; but when Rossini composed this piece of music its mission
was to introduce an adventure of the Emperor Aurelianus in Palmyra
in the third century of the Christian era. Having served that
purpose it became the prelude to another opera which dealt with
Queen Elizabeth of England, a monarch who reigned some twelve
hundred years after Aurelianus. Again, before the melody now known
as that of Almaviva's cavatina had burst into the efflorescence
which now distinguishes it, it came as a chorus from the mouths of
Cyrus and his Persians in ancient Babylon.

When Mr. Lumley desired to produce Verdi's "Nabucodonosor" (called
"Nabucco" for short) in London in 1846 he deferred to English
tradition and brought out the opera as "Nino, Re d'Assyria." I
confess that I cannot conceive how changing a king of Babylon to a
king of Assyria could possibly have brought about a change one way
or the other in the effectiveness of Verdi's Italian music, but Mr.
Lumley professed to have found in the transformation reason for the
English failure. At any rate, he commented, in his "Reminiscences
of the Opera," "That the opera thus lost much of its original
character, especially in the scene where the captive Israelites
became very uninteresting Babylonians, and was thereby shorn of one
element of success present on the Continent, is undeniable."

There is another case even more to the purpose of this present
discussion. In 1818 Rossini produced his opera "Mose in Egitto" in
Naples. The strength of the work lay in its choruses; yet two of