ying harmonies in the violins, paints such a picture of the
blank despair of a broken heart as Wagner himself, with his immense
orchestral resources, never surpassed. In the general construction of
his opera Purcell followed the French model, but his treatment of
recitative is bolder and more various than that of Lulli, while as a
melodist he is incomparably superior. Purcell never repeated the
experiment of 'Dido and AEneas.' Musical taste in England was presumably
not cultivated enough to appreciate a work of so advanced a style. At
any rate, for the rest of his life, Purcell wrote nothing for the
theatre but incidental music. Much of this, notably the scores of 'Timon
of Athens,' 'Bonduca,' and 'King Arthur,' is wonderfully beautiful, but
in all of these works the spoken dialogue forms the basis of the piece,
and the music is merely an adjunct, often with little reference to the
main interest of the play. In 'King Arthur' occurs the famous 'Frost
Scene,' the close resemblance of which to the 'Choeur de Peuples des
Climats Glaces' in Lulli's 'Isis' would alone make it certain that
Purcell was a careful student of the French school of opera.

Opera did not take long to cross the Alps, and early in the seventeenth
century the works of Italian composers found a warm welcome at the
courts of southern Germany. But Germany was not as yet ripe for a
national opera. During the first half of the century there are records
of one or two isolated attempts to found a school of German opera, but
the iron heel of the Thirty Years' War was on the neck of the country,
and art struggled in vain against overwhelming odds. The first German
opera, strictly so called, was the 'Dafne' of Heinrich Schuetz, the words
of which were a translation of the libretto already used by Peri. Of
this work, which was produced in 1627, all trace has been lost.
'Seelewig,' by Sigmund Staden, which is described as a 'Gesangweis auf
italienische Art gesetzet,' was printed at Nuremberg in 1644, but there
is no record of its ever having been performed. To Hamburg belongs the
honour of establishing German opera upon a permanent basis. There, in
1678, some years before the production of Purcell's 'Dido and AEneas,' an
opera-house was opened with a performance of a Singspiel entitled 'Der
erschaffene, gefallene und aufgerichtete Mensch,' the music of which was
composed by Johannn Theile. Three other works, all of them secular,
were produced in the same year. The n