that were lost when it was carried from Italy to Paris; and no one has been able to restore them to their original—not even Gluck himself. What makes this loss the more serious is that the missing parts belong to the very substance of the piece, where the opera reaches the height of the conflict in Alceste's soul between duty and feeling. Had Gluck not been so attached to this opera, he would have composed it over again. If we set aside this loss—and it does not enter into what we shall hear tonight—we may say that no one in the history of opera, neither before Gluck nor after him, has succeeded in embodying the emotion of love, and in creating the violent dramatic con-flict, in music, as Gluck succeeded in this opera whose overture we hear this evening.

Its story, in brief, turns on this: Alceste, in her self-effacing love for her husband Admetus, chose to add to his life what remained of her own, and the gods accepted the exchange. But Hercules—the strong and wise—arrives at the very moment when Alceste intended to carry out that great sacrifice, and restores her to her husband after obtaining leave of Death. On this idea the opera turns from its beginning to its end.

The musicians begin with a musical expo-sition, many-voiced and many-colored, of all the beauty and love a man can imagine; then it develops and sinks low, as though we were drawing near the sac-rifice; then it quavers

and trembles, carrying us into a theatrical atmos-phere which, we feel, is preparing us to witness a tragedy; then, upon its strains, we pass into a state of bewilderment, as though Alceste hesitated to count her deed a kind of sacrifice, asking her-self: Where am I?—and as though heavenly voices were disputing with her over that cruel mercy which takes away the life of one human being to lengthen the life of another.

And we hear the bugles and trumpets and all the wind instruments repre-senting the voices of heaven, as if they were arguing with Alceste's voice, while the vari-ous stringed instruments represent the atmos-phere in which that singular crisis arose.

Perhaps among Gluck's greatest achievements is that he was able to assign to every instru-ment of the orchestra a particular meaning for it to express; and after him every instrument came to have its meaning among musical composers.

Such is the standing of the opera Alceste in the world of opera; and it is, as you see, a new page not only in the history of opera but in the history of music. And yet, when it was played for the first time, some of its parts having been lost, Gluck cried out in grief and dis-appointment: Alceste has fallen! And Jean-Jacques Rousseau answered him: Yes—but she has fallen from heaven! And in truth we shall feel now, as we listen to the over-ture of this piece, that we are hearing music come to us from heaven.