HE ROLE OF JEWELS in opera is a dual one. They play a part in the audience as well as on the stage. Ever since the origins of the drama in music, during the last years of the i 6th century, the opera has been a social event and has furnished a favorite occasion for the display of riches among the wealthy portion of the public. On the great gala nights of a not too distant past, when command performances were given at Covent Garden in London, or there was theatre-pare at the royal and imperial opera houses of the Continent, the multicolored uniforms and decorations of the men were eclipsed by the women's gowns and brilliant ornaments. At the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, the legendary horseshoe was aptly named. boxes, arranged in a form resembling a horseshoe, were occupied by plutocracy. And it was a matter of national interest, of publication in the press, whether Mrs. Astor had worn her pearls, Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish her diamond stomacher, or some fair visitor from South America had appeared with an emerald diadem of fabulous price crowning her sable locks. This part played by jewels-real jewels-in opera is perhaps the more obvious. It is less often realized what an importance pieces of jewelry-or their imitations-assume in the plots of certain operas. With this type of paste and bauble we are here chiefly concerned. In some plots, the function of the jewels is basic: they supply the motivating force that prompts the actions of the characters. Thus in Wolf-Ferrari's Jewels of the Madonna, Camille Erlanger's Aphrodite, and the American one-act opera The Temple Dancer, by John Adam Hugo, they lead to ruinous acts of sacrilege. jewel-motif is introduced immediately in the WolfFerrari work. stage directions describing the outdoor scene at the rise of the curtain tell us, among other things, of the presence of worthy housewives who are wearing large ear-rings. Here we have the only ornament, still used by modern civilized nations, that once necessitated a mutilation of the body before it could be 485