The charge of being a mere tune-spinner, the denial of invention, depth, and character, have been common watchwords in the mouths of critics wedded to other schools.  But Rossini’s place in music stands unshaken by all assaults.  The vivacity of his style, the freshness of his melodies, the richness of his combinations, made all the Italian music that preceded him pale and colorless.  No other writer revels in such luxury of beauty, and delights the ear with such a succession of delicious surprises in melody.

Henry Chorley, in his “Thirty Years’ Musical Recollections,” rebukes the bigotry which sees nothing good but in its own kind:  “I have never been able to understand why this [referring to the Rossinian richness of melody] should be contemned as necessarily false and meretricious—­why the poet may not be allowed the benefit of his own period and time—­why a lover of architecture is to be compelled to swear by the Dom at Bamberg, or by the Cathedral at Monreale—­that he must abhor and denounce Michel Angelo’s church or the Baths of Diocletian at Rome—­why the person who enjoys ‘Il Barbiere’ is to be denounced as frivolously faithless to Mozart’s ’Figaro’—­and as incapable of comprehending ‘Fidelio,’ because the last act of ‘Otello’ and the second of ’Guillaume 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