Toreador

Toreador
please don't spit on the floor
Use the cuspidor
That's what it's for!

Anon

To be sung of course to the obvious melody from Carmen. Wolf thought that Wagner had perfected the art of setting words to music. Curious that, when you reflect that it was Wolf himself who perfected the art, while Wagner of course never wrote any music at all (tho' his libretti are better than the 19th century average and he was a decent art theorist and philosopher in the German Idealist style—if that isn't an oxymoron). A harder art still, one might think, is to fit words to a preëxisting melody, which is what Ira Gershwin apparently did to George's melodies and Michael Flanders famously did to one of Mozart's horn concerti—and what our anonymous Master of the Cuspidors does here.
I include this text here because—it seems to me—the way in which the last line fits the melody is, quite simply, perfect. It is worthy of Wolf. There is no higher praise.

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