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 important part than
before, and elaborated the concerted music, especially in the _finales_,
to a degree of artistic beauty before unknown in the Italian opera.
Above all, he made the operatic orchestra what it is to-day. Every new
instrument that was invented Rossini found a place for in his brilliant
scores, and thereby incurred the warmest indignation of all writers
of the old school. Before him the orchestras had consisted largely of
strings, but Rossini added an equally imposing clement of the brasses
and reeds. True, Mozart had forestalled Rossini in many if not all these
innovations, a fact which the Italian cheerfully admitted; for, with