Tell’ making up his mind while still a young man to abandon the stage for ever.  Nevertheless, although much of his music soon became old-fashioned, Rossini’s work was not unimportant.  The invention of the cabaletta, or quick movement, following the cavatina or slow movement, must be ascribed to him, an innovation which has affected the form of opera, German and French, as well as Italian, throughout this century.  Even more important was the change which he introduced into the manner of singing fioriture or florid music.  Before his day singers had been accustomed to introduce cadenzas of their own, to a great extent when they liked.  Rossini insisted upon their singing nothing but what was set down for them.  Naturally he was compelled to write cadenzas for them as elaborate and effective as those which they had been in the habit of improvising, so that much of his Italian music sounds empty and meaningless to our ears.  But he introduced the thin edge of the wedge, and although even to the days of Jenny Lind singers were occasionally permitted to interpolate cadenzas of their own, the old tradition that an opera was merely an opportunity for the display of individual vanity was doomed.

The music of Donizetti (1798-1848) is now paying the price of a long career of popularity by enduring a season of neglect.  His tragic operas, which were the delight of opera-goers in the fifties and sixties, sound cold and thin to modern ears.  There is far more genuine life in his lighter works, many of which still delight us by their unaffected tunefulness and vivacity.  Donizetti had little musical education, and his spirit rebelled so strongly against the rules of counterpoint that he preferred to go into the army rather than to devote himself to church music.  His first opera, ‘Enrico di Borgogna,’ was produced in 1818, and for the next five-and-twenty years he worked assiduously, producing in all no fewer than sixty-five operas.

‘Lucia di Lammermoor’ (1835), which was for many years one of the most popular works in the Covent Garden repertory, has now sunk to the level of a mere prima donna’s opera, to be revived once or twice a year in order to give a popular singer an opportunity for vocal display.  Yet there are passages in it of considerable dramatic power, and many of the melodies are fresh and expressive.  The plot is founded upon ’The Bride of Lammermoor,’ but it is Scott’s tragic romance seen through very Italian spectacles indeed.  Henry Ashton has promised the hand of his sister Lucy to Lord Arthur Bucklaw, hoping by means of this marriage to recruit the fallen fortunes of his house.  Lucy loves Edgar Ravenswood, the hereditary foe of her family, and vows to be true to him while he is away on an embassy in France.  During his absence Ashton contrives to intercept Ravenswood’s letters to his sister, and finally produces a forged paper, which Lucy accepts as the proof of her lover’s infidelity.  She yields to the pressure of her brother’s entreaties,