this, though, in after-years, he treated the voice as ruthlessly in many of his most important arias and scenas as he would a brass instrument.  He arrived in Vienna just as the Rossini madness was at its height, and his own blood was fired to compose operas a la Rossini for the Italian theatres.  So he proceeded with prodigious industry to turn out operas.  In 1818 he wrote “Romilda e Costanza” for Padua; in 1819, “Semiramide” for Turin; in 1820, “Emma di Resburgo” for Venice; in 1822, “Margherita d’Anjou” for Milan; and in 1823, “L’Esule di Granata,” also for Milan.  These works of the composer’s ’prentice hand met with the usual fate of the production of the thousand and one musicians who pour forth operas in unremitting flow for the Italian theatres; but they were excellent drill for the future author of “Robert le Diable” and “Les Huguenots.”  On returning to Germany Meyerbeer was very sarcastically criticised on the one side as a fugitive from the ranks of German music, on the other as an imitator of Rossini.

Meyerbeer returned to Venice, and in 1824 brought out “Il Crociato in Egitto” in that city, an opera which made the tour of Europe, and established a reputation for the author as the coming rival of Rossini, no one suspecting from what Meyerbeer had then accomplished that he was about to strike boldly out in a new direction.  “II Crociato” was produced in Paris in 1825, and the same year in London.  In the latter city, Veluti, the last of the male sopranists, was one of the principal singers in the opera; and it was said by some of the ill-natured critics that curiosity to see and hear this singer of a peculiar kind, of whom it was said, “Non vir sed Veluti,” had as much to do with the success of the opera as its merits.  Lord Mount Edgcumbe, however, an excellent critic, wrote of it “as quite of the new school, but not copied from its founder, Rossini; original, odd, flighty, and it might be termed fantastic, but at times beautiful.  Here and there most delightful melodies and harmonies occurred, but it was unequal, solos being as rare as in all the modern operas.”  This was the last of Meyerbeer’s operas written in the Italian style.  In 1827 the composer married, and for several years lived a quiet, secluded life.  The loss of his first two children so saddened him as to concentrate his attention for a while on church music.  During this period he composed only a “Stabat,” a “Miserere,” a “Te Deum,” and eight of Klopstock’s songs.  But he was preparing for that new departure on which his reputation as a great composer now rests, and which called forth such bitter condemnation on the one hand, such thunders of eulogy on the other.  His old fellow pupil, Weber, wrote of him in after-years:  “He prostituted his profound, admirable, and serious German talent for the applause of the crowd which he ought to have despised.”  And Mendelssohn wrote to his father in words of still more angry disgust:  “When in ‘Robert le Diable’ nuns