ury, as Gluck was of the
eighteenth.

An epoch-making event in opera history was the opening, in 1637, of the
first public opera house in commercial Venice whose wealth afforded her
citizens leisure to cultivate art. Soon popular demand led to the
erection of many Italian opera-houses. At the same time growing taste
for magnificence of stage setting and brilliant, dazzling, even
extravagant song effects, caused neglect of Academician principles. The
learned and gifted Neapolitan composer, Alessandro Scarlatti, father of
the famous harpsichordist, gave an impulse in his operas, during the
last quarter of the century, to sensuous charm and beauty of melody. He
invested recitative with classic value, enlarged the aria, and devised
the da capo which became a menace to dramatic truth.

In France, the troubadours had borne melody into the domain of
sentiment, and laid a solid foundation for musical growth. Adam de la
Halle's pastoral, "Robin et Marion," was an actual prototype of the
opera. During the seventeenth century Corneille and Moliere refined the
dramatic taste of their compatriots. Attempts to introduce Italian opera
only resulted in arousing a desire for an opera in accord with French
ideals.

This was gratified by Jean Battiste Lully, who had come to the French
court from Italy in boyhood, and had risen, in 1672, from a subordinate
position to that of chief musician. Undertaking to make reforms, he
succeeded in giving his adopted country a national opera. He established
the overture, gave recitative rhetorical force, added coloring to the
orchestra, and introduced the ballet. New life was infused into the
traditions he left when Jean Philippe Rameau, in 1733, at fifty years of
age, wrote his first opera. He was well-known as a theorist and
composer, and was the author of a harmony treatise in which were set
forth the laws of chord inversions and derivations, a stroke of genius
that hopelessly entangled him in perplexities. His instrumentation was
more highly colored, his rhythms more varied than those of his
predecessor, and his sincerity of purpose more evident. In common with
other reformers he was accused of "sacrificing the pleasures of the ear
to vain harmonic speculations." Some of his many operas were written to
works of Racine. He died in 1764, in his eighty-first year.

A century earlier the English reached the culmination of their Golden
Age of musical productiveness in Henry Purcell, known as the mos