of the battle for Jerusalem. They hear shouts of victory from outside and the Count, the Legate, and Crusaders enter followed by Gaston with the visor of his helmet closed. Praised for his bravery and asked to reveal his identity, Gaston announces that he is now prepared to be executed. Just then, the mortally wounded Roger is brought in and reveals himself as the Count's brother. He begs for mercy for Gaston and confesses to being the one who planned the murder which almost resulted in his brother's death. All rejoice at the restoration of Gaston's honor and position, as Roger takes one final look at Jerusalem and he dies. Music In describing the changes made to the original opera, Budden observes that the revised version has far greater strengths than those acknowledged by many Italian and English writers and that "the diffuse drama which Solera had distilled from an epic poem is replaced by a far tauter, more concentrated plot which not only makes fewer demands on our credulity than I Lombardi but also avoids the problem of a second tenor who needs to be weightier and more heroic than the first." He continues by acknowledging that the newly composed numbers and the repositioning of the original ones were: soldered together by linking passages of far greater significance than the string-accompanied recitative which they replace. The entire opera, as befits one designed for the French stage, is more "through-composed" than its parent work; and only a sentimentalist could regret the omission of all that was most embarrassingly naïf in the original score. Roger Parker finds two particularly strong elements in the French version: firstly, "that by converting Arvino from a tenor to a baritone, [he] solves one of the problems of vocal distribution that occurred [in the original]" and, secondly, that this version "serves as a fascinating first document in charting Verdi's relationship with the French stage, a relationship that was to become increasingly important during the next decade." Not surprisingly, Budden (and others writing on the subject over the past 30 years, including Baldini who calls it "a tired, disheartened reshuffle" ), regard Jérusalem as "something less than a masterpiece", but his chapter concludes with a summary of what the experience of working in Paris did for Verdi and the part it played in moving the composer forward towards his mature style: "It fixed his dramatic imagination, refined