olutionised the opera.
Fortunately, he had a still greater contemporary to carry on his
reforms. Gluck has himself explained how he set out to avoid any
concession of music to the vocal abilities of the singer; how he
had tried to bring music to its proper function, _i.e._, to go
side by side with the poetry of the drama--a clear forecasting of
Wagner's own reforms.

Whereas in Monteverde's operas the dramatic significance was
kept, but only at the expense of the music, which had absolutely
no signification at all, in the works of Gluck, Mozart and
Scarlatti the musical part is elevated, but entirely at the
expense of the dramatic idea, which is quite lost. A Mozart
melody, rhythmic, square-cut, is as different as possible from a
Wagner theme, for whereas the former suggests nothing the latter
is very rich in suggestion. It is clear that Gluck and Mozart,
though they performed an inestimable service to the musical art
by the raising of the orchestra to its proper position with
regard to the voice and the music, yet failed to keep in view the
continuity of the drama in opera. Hence it was that Weber and
Beethoven frankly abolished the recitative that joins the formal
melodies of the arias and melodic passages and composed
Singspiel, having their works built up of airs and melodies
joined by spoken dialogue. Such is Weber's _Der Freischuetz_ and
such Beethoven's _Fidelio_.

After discussing Meyerbeer, Scarlatti, and Rossini, Bellini and
Donizetti, my son comes to Wagner and the revolution in music he
accomplished:

Wagner was a man of ripe culture, who was equally familiar with
Beethoven's symphonies, Shakespeare's dramas, Kant's philosophic
writings and Homer's epics. All the great works of literature and
philosophy were well known to him. Thus he brought to bear on his
music a mind singularly well equipped in every direction. He was,
too, essentially a Teuton, with all the German massiveness of
conception and depth of soul. A lesser man must have fallen
before the prospect of attempting such a colossal reform. What
was that reform in its essentials? It was this--to compose opera
in which the idea of the drama was made the ruling conception; to
attain this end by a wedding of suitable poetry to music of such
a kind as should reflect by its theme