ght of bringing this about by a sacrifice
of any of the forms of his own peculiar art. His influence, however, was
very great, and the traditions of the great _maestro's_ art have
been kept alive in the works of his no less great disciples, Mehul,
Cherubini, Spontini, and Meyerbeer.

Two other attempts to ingraft new and vital power on the rigid and
trivial sentimentality of the Italian forms of opera were those of
Rossini and Weber. The former was gifted with the greatest affluence
of pure melodiousness ever given to a composer. But even his sparkling
originality and freshness did little more than reproduce the old forms
under a more attractive guise. Weber, on the other hand, stood in the
van of a movement which had its fountain-head in the strong romantic and
national feeling, pervading the whole of society and literature. There
was a general revival of mediaeval and popular poetry, with its balmy
odor of the woods, and fields, and streams. Weber's melody was the
direct offspring of the tunefulness of the German _Volkslied_, and so
it expressed, with wonderful freshness and beauty, all the range
of passion and sentiment within the limits of this pure and simple
language. But the boundaries were far too narrow to build upon them the
ultimate union of music and poetry, which should express the perfect
harmony of the two arts. While it is true that all of the great German
composers protested, by their works, against the spirit and character
of the Italian school of music, Wagner claims that the first abrupt and
strongly-defined departure toward a radical reform in art is found in
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with chorus. Speaking of this remarkable leap
from instrumental to vocal music in a professedly symphonic composition,
Wagner, in his "Essay on Beethoven," says: "We declare that the work of
art, which was formed and quickened entirely by that deed, must present
the most perfect artistic form, i.e., that form in which, as for the
drama, so also and especially for music, every conventionality would
be abolished." Beethoven is asserted to have founded the new musical
school, when he admitted, by his recourse to the vocal cantata in the
greatest of his symphonic works, that he no longer recognized absolute
music as sufficient unto itself.

In Bach and Handel, the great masters of fugue and counterpoint; in
Rossini, Mozart, and Weber, the consummate creators of melody--then,
according to this view, we only recognize thin