age again,
with his "Otello" and "Falstaff," he had adopted Wagner's maxims that
arias are out of place in a music-drama; that "the play's the thing,"
and that the music should follow the text word for word.

Surely, this was the most remarkable of Wagner's triumphs and conquests.
He who had been denounced for decades as being unable to write properly
for the voice was actually taken up as a model by the greatest composer
of Italy, the land of song. Moreover, all the young composers of Italy
have turned their backs on the traditions of Italian opera. The chief
ambition of Mascagni, Leoncavallo, Puccini, and all the others has been
to be called "the Italian Wagner;" and their operas are much more like
Wagner's than like Rossini's and Donizetti's, being free from arias and
the vocal embroideries that formerly were the essence of Italian opera.
The same is true of the operas written in recent decades in France,
Germany, and other countries. Massenet, Saint-Saens, Humperdinck,
Goldmark, Richard Strauss, Paderewski, and all the others have followed
in Wagner's footsteps.

Such, briefly told, is the story of Richard Wagner and Modern Music. The
"music of the future" has become the music of the present. What the
future will bring no one can tell. Croakers say, as they have always
said, that the race of giants has died out. But who knew, fifty years
ago, that Wagner and Liszt, or even their predecessors, Chopin and
Schumann, and the song specialist, Robert Franz, were giants? We know it
now, and future generations will know whether we have giants among us.
Things of beauty that will be a joy forever have been created by men of
genius now living in Europe; such men as the Norwegian Grieg, the
Bohemian Dvorak, the French Saint-Saens and Massenet, the Hungarian
Goldmark, the German Humperdinck and Richard Strauss, the Polish
Paderewski. England has more good composers and listeners than it ever
had before; and the same is true of America. We have no school of opera
yet, but the best operettas of Victor Herbert and De Koven deserve
mention by the side of those of the French. Offenbach, Lecocq, and
Audran, the Viennese Strauss, Suppe, and Milloecker, the English
Sullivan. The orchestral compositions of our John K. Paine are
masterworks, and the songs and pianoforte pieces of MacDowell are equal
to anything produced in Europe since Chopin and Franz. We have several
other men of great promise, and altogether the outlook for America,