E mma Bovary attends a performance of Gaetano Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor while still recuperating from her rejection by her lover. At first fortified by a cynicism induced by chagrin, she listens to the opera with a degree of melancholy detachment. Eventually affected by the urgency of the music and the passion of the singing (despite the makeshift scenery that quakes as the singers pace the stage) she pines again for a semblance of the ardor expressed and received by the heroine. This new longing is as intense as that once engendered by her reading of Sir Walter Scott's novel, The Bride of Lammermoor, the basis of the opera. The tragic d6nouement upon the stage only quickens her romantic impulse. It is obvious that Flaubert's allusions to Lucia di Lammermoor and the Scott novel prompted Ega de Queir6s's citation of Giuseppe Verdi's La traviata and the novel from which it was derived, La dame aux camelias by Alexandre Dumas fils. It is probable as well that Dumas's ironic use of Donizetti's La favorite, in the play derived from the novel, was noted by the Portuguese author. However, such influences, once observed, should not be allowed to obscure the originality of his consummate elaboration. In O Primo Basilio plot, characterization and theme evolve through a system of musical allusion and analogy. However, only a cursory evaluation has been made of this feature of the novel. This oversight is reflected in Roy Campbell's English translation which deletes, abridges or inexplicably modifies many of the operatic references through which the author establishes the interrelation of his characters, transforming their everyday experiences into allegory. Using Goethe's Faust, as distilled through Charles Gounod's music, as a framework, Ega transcended the Naturalism of his models, Balzac, Flaubert and Zola, to recreate, within the four walls of a Portuguese home, the quest of the jaded philosopher and relate a parable of alienation whose lyricism impinged upon Hispanic Modernismo.1 Ega's residence in England (where he began O Primo Basilio in 1874) and long sojourn in Paris (where he died in 1900) enabled him, a sometime music critic, to see many op ras still performed today, and to hear concert artists of the calibre of a Liszt and Thalberg, whom he mentions in the novel. Lisbon may have been a provincial musical center by comparison, but an idiomatic standard of performance was then as now often attained at