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 the simple frankness characteristic of the man, he always spoke of his obligations to and his admiration of the great German.  To an admirer who was one day burning incense before him, Rossini said, in the spirit of Cimarosa quoted elsewhere:  “My ‘Barber’ is only a bright farce, but in Mozart’s ‘Marriage of Figaro’ you have the finest possible masterpiece of musical comedy.”

With all concessions made to Mozart as the founder of the forms of modern opera, an equally high place must be given to Rossini for the vigor and audacity with which he made these available, and impressed them on all his contemporaries and successors.  Though Rossini’s self-love was flattered by constant adulation, his expressions of respect and admiration for such composers as Mozart, Gluck, Beethoven, and Cherubini display what a catholic and generous nature he possessed.  The judgment of Ambros, a severe critic, whose bias was against Rossini, shows what admiration was wrung from him by the last opera of the composer:  “Of all that particularly characterizes Rossini’s early operas nothing is discoverable in ‘Tell;’ there is none of his usual mannerism; but, on the contrary, unusual richness of form and careful finish of detail, combined with grandeur of outline.  Meretricious embellishment, shakes, runs, and cadences are carefully avoided in this work, which is natural and characteristic throughout; even the melodies have not the stamp and style of Rossini’s earlier times, but only their graceful charm and lively coloring.”

Rossini must be allowed to be unequaled in genuine comic opera, and to have attained a distinct greatness in serious opera, to be the most comprehensive and at the same time the most national composer of Italy, to be, in short, the Mozart of his country.  After all has been admitted and regretted—­that he gave too little attention to musical science; that he often neglected to infuse into his work the depth and passion of which it was easily capable; that he placed too high a value on merely brilliant effects ad captandum vulgus—­there remains the fact that his operas embody a mass of imperishable music, which will live with the art itself.  Musicians of every country now admit his wondrous grace, his fertility and freshness of invention, his matchless treatment of the voice, his effectiveness in arrangement of the orchestra.  He can never be made a model, for his genius had too much spontaneity and individuality of color.  But he impressed and modified music hardly less than Gluck, whose tastes and methods were entirely antagonistic to his own.  That he should have retired from the exercise of his art while in the full flower of his genius is a perplexing fact.  No stranger story is recorded in the annals of art with respect to a genius who filled the world with his glory, and then chose to vanish, “not unseen.”  On finishing his crowning stroke of genius and skill in “William Tell,” he might have said with Shakespeare’s enchanter, Prospero: