llaume Tell,' but preferred a life of ease and
leisure to entering the lists once more as a candidate for fame. What
the world lost by this decision, it is difficult to say; but if we
remember the extraordinary development which took place in the style and
methods of Wagner and Verdi, we cannot think without regret of the
composer of 'Guillaume Tell' making up his mind while still a young man
to abandon the stage for ever. Nevertheless, although much of his music
soon became old-fashioned, Rossini's work was not unimportant. The
invention of the cabaletta, or quick movement, following the cavatina or
slow movement, must be ascribed to him, an innovation which has affected
the form of opera, German and French, as well as Italian, throughout
this century. Even more important was the change which he introduced
into the manner of singing _fioriture_ or florid music. Before his day
singers had been accustomed to introduce cadenzas of their own, to a
great extent when they liked. Rossini insisted upon their singing
nothing but what was set down for them. Naturally he was compelled to
write cadenzas for them as elaborate and effective as those which they
had been in the habit of improvising, so that much of his Italian music
sounds empty and meaningless to our ears. But he introduced the thin
edge of the wedge, and although even to the days of Jenny Lind singers
were occasionally permitted to interpolate cadenzas of their own, the
old tradition that an opera was merely an opportunity for the display of
individual vanity was doomed.

The music of Donizetti (1798-1848) is now paying the price of a long
career of popularity by enduring a season of neglect. His tragic operas,
which were the delight of opera-goers in the fifties and sixties, sound
cold and thin to modern ears. There is far more genuine life in his
lighter works, many of which still delight us by their unaffected
tunefulness and vivacity. Donizetti had little musical education, and
his spirit rebelled so strongly against the rules of counterpoint that
he preferred to go into the army rather than to devote himself to church
music. His first opera, 'Enrico di Borgogna,' was produced in 1818, and
for the next five-and-twenty years he worked assiduously, producing in
all no fewer than sixty-five operas.

'Lucia di Lammermoor' (1835), which was for many years one of the most
popular works in the Covent Garden repertory, has now sunk to the level
of a mere prima donna's