lace in music stands unshaken by
all assaults. The vivacity of his style, the freshness of his melodies,
the richness of his combinations, made all the Italian music that
preceded him pale and colorless. No other writer revels in such luxury
of beauty, and delights the ear with such a succession of delicious
surprises in melody.

Henry Chorley, in his "Thirty Years' Musical Recollections," rebukes the
bigotry which sees nothing good but in its own kind: "I have never been
able to understand why this [referring to the Rossinian richness of
melody] should be contemned as necessarily false and meretricious--why
the poet may not be allowed the benefit of his own period and time--why
a lover of architecture is to be compelled to swear by the _Dom_
at Bamberg, or by the Cathedral at Monreale--that he must abhor and
denounce Michel Angelo's church or the Baths of Diocletian at Rome--why
the person who enjoys 'Il Barbiere' is to be denounced as frivolously
faithless to Mozart's 'Figaro'--and as incapable of comprehending
'Fidelio,' because the last act of 'Otello' and the second of 'Guillaume
Tell' transport him into as great an enjoyment of its kind as do
the duet in the cemetery between 'Don Juan' and 'Leporello' and the
'Prisoners' Chorus.' How much good, genial pleasure has not the world
lost in music, owing to the pitting of styles one against the other!
Your true traveler will be all the more alive to the beauty of Nuremberg
because he has looked out over the 'Golden Shell' at Palermo; nor
delight in Rhine and Danube the less because he has seen the glow of a
southern sunset over the broken bridge at Avignon."

As grand and true as are many of the essential elements in the Wagner
school of musical composition, the bitterness and narrowness of spite
with which its upholders have pursued the memory of Rossini is equally
offensive and unwarrantable. Rossini, indeed, did not revolutionize
the forms of opera as transmitted to him by his predecessors, but he
reformed and perfected them in various notable ways. Both in comic
and serious opera, music owes much to Rossini. He substituted genuine
singing for the endless recitative of which the Italian opera before him
largely consisted; he brought the bass and baritone voices to the front,
banished the pianoforte from the orchestra, and laid down the principle
that the singer should deliver the notes written for him without
additions of his own. He gave the chorus a much more impo