ble supply. My phrase is not exaggerated, for Offenbach hardly
dreamed of creating an art. He was endowed with a genius for the comic
and an abundance of melody, but he had no thought of doing anything
beyond providing material for the theatre he managed at the time. As a
matter of fact he was almost its only author.

He was unable to rid himself of his Germanic influences and so corrupted
the taste of an entire generation by his false prosody, which has been
incorrectly considered originality. In addition he was lacking in taste.
At the time they affected a dreadful mannerism of always stopping on the
next to the last note of a passage, whether or not it was associated
with a mute syllable. This mannerism had no purpose beyond indicating to
the audience the end of a passage and giving the claque the signal to
applaud. Offenbach did not belong to that heroic strain to which success
is the least of its cares. So he adopted this mannerism, and often his
ingeniously turned and charming couplets are ruined by this silly
absurdity now gone out of fashion.

Furthermore, he wrote badly, for his early education was neglected. If
the _Tales of Hoffman_ shows traces of a practised pen, it is because
Guiraud finished the score and went out of his way to remedy some of
the author's mistakes. Leaving aside the bad prosody and the minor
defects in taste, we have left a work which shows a wealth of invention,
melody, and sparkling fancy comparable to Gretry's.

Gretry was no more a great musician than Offenbach, for he also wrote
badly. The essential difference between the two was the care, not only
in his prosody but also in his declamation, which Gretry tried to
reproduce musically with all possible exactness. He overshot the mark in
this for he did not see that in singing the expression of a note is
modified by the harmonic scheme which accompanies it. It must be
recognized, in addition, that many times Gretry was carried away by his
melodic inventiveness and forgot his own principles so that he relegated
his care for declamation to second place.

What hurt Gretry was his unbounded conceit, with which Offenbach, to his
credit, was never afflicted. As an indication of this, he dared to write
in his advice to young musicians:

"Those who have genius will make opera-comique like mine; those who have
talent will write opera like Gluck's; while those who have neither
genius nor talent, will write symphonies like Haydn's."

However