The history of Italian opera from after its culmination in Mozart to its subsidence on the big drum and cymbals of the Rossinians is the history of a protected industry

Verdi's art is far more the crown of his native genius than of his native traditions; and, though opinions differ as to the spontaneity and depth of the change, the paradox is true that the Wagnerization of Verdi was the musical emancipation of Italy.

After Mozart the next step in the development of true operatic art was neither Italian nor German, but French. The French sense of dramatic fitness had a wonderfully stimulating effect upon every foreign composer who came to France. Rossini himself, in Guillaume Tell, was electrified into a dramatic and orchestral life of an incomparably higher order than the rollicking rattle of serious and comic Italian opera in its decline. He was in the prime of life when he wrote it, but it exhausted him and was practically his last important work, though he lived to a cheerful old age.

Wagnerian opera, a generation after Wagner's death, was still an unique phenomenon. With Wagner the history of classical opera ends and a new history begins, for in Wagner's hands opera first became a single art-form, a true and indivisible music-drama, instead of a kind of dramatic casket for a collection of objets d'art more or less aptly arranged in theatrical tableaux.

Modern opera of genuine artistic significance ranges from the light song-play type admirably represented by Bizet's Carmen to the exclusively "atmospheric" impressionism of Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande.

A. Thus in Die Zauberflote the extravagant vocal fireworks of the Queen of Night are the displays of one who, in the words of the high priest Sarastro, "hopes to cajole the people with illusions and superstition."

B. His results are now intelligible only to historians, and they seem to us artistically worthless; but in their day they were so impressive as to make the further continuance of 16th-century choral art impossible.

C. The "spirit of the age" can have had little to do with the difficulty, or why should Shakespeare not have had a contemporary operatic brother-artist during the "Golden Age" of music?

D. The French contribution to musical history between Gluck and Rossini is of great nobility. French dramatic sense stimulated foreign composers and widened their choice of subjects, as it also preserved all except the Italian forms of opera from decline.

E. Tunes were soon legalized at moments of dramatic repose when the actors could indulge in either a dance or a display of vocalization; it was in the tunes that the strong harmonic system of modern tonality took shape.

F. So "dramatic music" at that time was as unbelievable as "dramatic architecture." But the literary and musical dilettanti who met at the house of the Bardi were not mature musical artists; their imaginations were fired by the dream of restoring the glories of Greek tragedy, especially on the side of its musical declamation.

G. Nobody cares to follow the plot of Mozart's Figaro; but then no spectator of Beaumarchais's Mariage de Figaro is prevented by the intricacy of its plot from enjoying it as a play. In both cases we are interested in the character-drawing. We do no justice to Mozart's music when we forget this interest.

H. If, however, it is taken to mean that because Mozart's triumphs do not lie in serious opera he owes nothing to Gluck, then the statement is misleading.