In the evening Garden's sister (I believe she is engaged to Baklanov) invited me to her boxto hear Monna Vanna, but seemed rather put out when I criticised the music of the opera and professed myself astonished that singers as good as Garden, Baklanov and Muratore would waste their efforts on such rubbish. Incidentally, also in the cast were my royal characters, the Prince and the King. The Prince looks like an oil painting but in the large theatre auditorium neither voice sounded as good as they had seemed to me in the rehearsal rooms.