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original genius England has produced. His dramatic powers were fostered
by the popular masques with their gorgeous show of color and rhythm, and
in mere boyhood he wrote music for several of them. In 1677, when only
nineteen, he produced his first opera. He attempted no reform, but his
instinct for the true relation between the accents of speech and those
of melody and recitative seems to have been unerring. Saturated with
native English melody, tingling with fertile fancy and controlled by
education, whether he wrote for stage, church, or chamber, he evinced a
freshness and vigor, a breezy picturesqueness and a wealth of rhythmic
phrases and patterns, and many new orchestral devices. In 1710, fifteen
years after his early death, the giant Handel began to dominate musical
England, flooding the stage with operas of the Italian type and finally
ushering in the reign of the oratorio. The delicate plant of English
opera never took root.

Italian influence had almost caused the decline of French opera when
Christopher Willibald Gluck turned to Paris, in 1774, as its
regenerator. In Vienna, twelve years earlier, he had already produced
his "Orfeo," whose calm, classic grandeur seemed the embodiment of the
Greek art spirit. His choice of subjects indicates the enterprise on
which he had embarked. He sought simplicity, subjugation of music to
poetic sentiment, dramatic sincerity and organic unity. His operatic
version of Racine's "Iphigenie en Aulide" called forth unbounded
enthusiasm in the French metropolis directly after his arrival, and led
to the warfare with the brilliant Italian Piccini, which was as hot as
any Wagner controversy.

The homage of all time is due this man of genius for the splendid
courage with which he attacked shams. He claimed it to be the divine
right of the dramatic composer to have his works sung precisely as he
had written them, and protested against the innovations that had been
permitted to suit the caprices and gratify the vanity of singers. It was
his idea that the Sinfonia, in other words the Overture or Prelude,
should indicate the subject and prepare the spectators for the
characters of the pieces, and that the instrumental coloring should be
adapted to the mood of the situation, thus anticipating modern
procedure. He prepared the way for the work of Cherubini, Auber, Gounod,
Thomas, Massenet, Saint-Saens and others.

In Germany, Italian opera, early introduced, long remained fashionable