he orthodox
thinkers represented by Anton Rubinstein and many others,
the new Russian school represented by Cui, Rimsky-Korsakov,
Tchaikovsky, and the successors of the French school of
Meyerbeer, namely, Saint-Saens, Massenet, etc.

In order to get a clear idea of the present state of the
matter we must review the question from the beginning of the
eighteenth century. For many reasons this is not an easy task,
first of all because very little of the music of the operas
of this period actually exists. We know the names of Hasse,
Pergolesi, Matheson, Graun, Alessandro Scarlatti (who was a much
greater man than his son the harpsichord player and composer,
Domenico), to name only a few. To be sure, a number of the
French operas of the period are preserved, owing to the custom
in France of engraving music. In Germany and Italy, however,
such operas were never printed, and one may safely say that
it was almost the rule for only one manuscript copy to be
available. Naturally this copy belonged to the composer, who
generally led the opera himself, improvising much of it on the
harpsichord, as we shall see later. As an instance of the danger
which operas, under such conditions, ran of being destroyed
and thus lost to the world, we may cite the total destruction
of over sixty of Hasse's operas in his extreme old age.

The second point which makes it difficult for us to get an
absolutely clear insight into the conditions of opera at the
beginning of the eighteenth century lies in the fact that
contemporary historians never brought their histories up
to their own times. Thus Marpurg, in his history, divides
music into four periods; first, that of Adam and Eve to
the flood; second, from the flood to the Argonauts; third,
to the beginning of the Olympiads; fourth, from thence to
Pythagoras. The same may be said of the celebrated histories
of Gerbert and Padre Martini.

On the other hand, we are certain that much of the modern
speculation was anticipated by these men. For instance, Matheson
calls pantomime "dumb music," freed from melodic and harmonic
forms. The idea was advanced that music owes its rhythmic
regularity and form to dancing, and architecture was called
frozen music, a metaphor which, in later days, was considered
such an original conception of Goethe and Schlegel. This same
inability of historians to bring their accounts up to the
contemporary times may be noticed in the later works of Forkel
(d. 1818) and Ambr