into the famous air, ‘Lascia ch’ io pianga,’ in ‘Rinaldo.’  When the new Hamburg Opera-House was opened in 1874, it was inaugurated by a performance of ‘Almira,’ which gave musicians a unique opportunity of realising to some extent what opera was like at the beginning of the eighteenth century.  In 1706 Handel left Hamburg for the purpose of prosecuting his studies in Italy.  There he found the world at the feet of Alessandro Scarlatti (1659-1725), a composer whose importance to the history of opera can scarcely be over-estimated.  He is said, like Cesti, to have been a pupil of Carissimi, though, as the latter died in 1674, at the age of seventy, he cannot have done much more than lay the foundation of his pupil’s greatness.  The invention of the da capo is generally attributed to Scarlatti, wrongly, as has already been shown, since it appears in Cesti’s opera ‘La Dori,’ which was performed in 1663.  But it seems almost certain that Scarlatti was the first to use accompanied recitative, a powerful means of dramatic expression in the hands of all who followed him, while his genius advanced the science of instrumentation to a point hitherto unknown.

Nevertheless, Scarlatti’s efforts were almost exclusively addressed to the development of the musical rather than the dramatic side of opera, and he is largely responsible for the strait-jacket of convention in which opera was confined during the greater part of the eighteenth century, in fact until it was released by the genius of Gluck.

Handel’s conquest of Italy was speedy and decisive.  ‘Rodrigo,’ produced at Florence in 1707, made him famous, and ‘Agrippina’ (Venice, 1708) raised him almost to the rank of a god.  At every pause in the performance the theatre rang with shouts of ‘Viva il caro Sassone,’ and the opera had an unbroken run of twenty-seven nights, a thing till then unheard of.  It did not take Handel long to learn all that Italy could teach him.  With his inexhaustible fertility of melody and his complete command of every musical resource then known, he only needed to have his German vigour tempered by Italian suppleness and grace to stand forth as the foremost operatic composer of the age.  His Italian training and his theatrical experience gave him a thorough knowledge of the capabilities of the human voice, and the practical common-sense which was always one of his most striking characteristics prevented him from ever treating it from the merely instrumental point of view, a pitfall into which many of the great composers have fallen.  He left Italy for London in 1710, and produced his ‘Rinaldo’ at the Queen’s Theatre in the Haymarket the following year.  It was put upon the stage with unexampled magnificence, and its success was prodigious.  ‘Rinaldo’ was quickly followed by such succession of masterpieces as put the ancient glories of the Italian stage to shame.  Most of them were produced at the Haymarket Theatre, either under Handel’s own management or under the auspices of a company