BOITO, Arrigo, Italian composer: b. Padua, 24 Feb. 1842. His great work, the opera (Mefistofele,) occupied him for nearly 20 years. The garden scene was written while he was a student in the Milan Conservatory in 1856, and the score was finished for the stage in 1868, the composer having done much literary work in the interim and lived variously in France, Germany and Poland. On 5 March 1868 'Mefistofele' was sung at La Scala, Milan, the performance lasting six hours, much inter rupted by hissing and applause, and its failure was evident. Boito then remodeled the opera, and in 1875 it was produced at Bologna with great success. It was sung in other cities with equal success, but it has never been a popular opera in the full sense of the word. In 1883 it was produced at the New York Metropolitan Opera House with Campanini and Nilsson in the cast and was revived in 1896 and again in 1901. The opera is considered one of the most important of modern Italian operas, marking, as it does, the precise point where the modern school of Italian composition, illustrated by the later works of Verdi, Mascagni, Puccini, etc., diverges from the work of the Bellini and Doni zetti school. Boito's other operas, 'Ero e Leandro,' 'Nerone' and 'Orestiade,' have never been sung. He wrote the libretti for Faccio's 'Amleto,> Ponchielli's 'Gioconda> and for Verdi's 'Otello' and 'Falstaff,' and trans lated several of Wagner's works. He also issued novels under the pen name of aTobio BOIVIN, Marie Anne Victoire (GILLAIN), French midwife, upon whom a diploma of M.D. was conferred by the Univer
sity of Marburg, noted for her writings on obstetrics: b. Montreuil, 9 April 1773; d. 16 May 1841. She was educated in a nunnery, where by her talents she attracted the attention of the sister of Louis XVI, Madame Elisabeth. When the nunnery where she was placed was destroyed in the course of the Revolution, she spent three years in the study of anatomy and midmifery at Etampes. In 1797 she married an employee at Versailles, of the name of Boivin, but on being left after a short time a widow with a child and without fortune, undertook the office of midwife at the Hospital of the Maternity, and, in 1801, was appointed chief superintendent of the institution, to which, in accordance with her suggestion, a special school of accouchement was added by Chaptal. Her 'Memorial de l'art des accouchements,> pub lished in 1824, passed through several editions. The Empress of Russia invited her to Saint Petersburg, but she declined. She also published 'Memorial stir les hemorrhagies internes de l'uterus> (1818) ; 'Recherches sur une des causes les plus f requentes les moins connues de l'avortement' (1828) ; (Trade pratique des maladies de l'uterus et de ses annexes' (2 vols., 1833).