Music: Old Dr. Damrosch

Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera, in its that-ain't-haydays, used to put on a U. S. opera almost every year. None was ever good enough to stay put. A typical one was a 1913 number about the swashbuckling, sword-nosed French poet of the 17th Century, Cyrano de Bergerac. Its better-than-average libretto was blank-versified out of Edmond Rostand's play by the late William J. Henderson, musicritic of the New York Sun. Its workmanlike score was put together, out of a wide knowledge of Wagner and other masters, by a conductor who had been toonering along since...

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