way,—­superb arias, many of them, especially in “Il Trovatore” and “Aida,” but still arias.  Then he rested from his labors sixteen years; and when he appeared on the stage 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, as well as for Europe, is bright.

AUTHORITIES.