For those who hold such a view with me it will be impossible to condemn pieces of set forms in the lyric drama.  Wagner still represents his art-work alone, but in the influence which he exerted upon contemporaneous composers in Italy and France, as well as Germany, he is quite as significant a figure as he is as the creator of the Musikdrama.  The operas which are most popular in our Italian and French repertories are those which benefited by the liberation from formalism and the exaltation of the dramatic idea which he preached and exemplified—­such works as Gounod’s “Faust,” Verdi’s “Aida” and “Otello,” and Bizet’s “Carmen.”  With that emancipation there came, as was inevitable, new conceptions of the province of dramatic singing as well as new convictions touching the mission of the orchestra.  The instruments in Wagner’s latter-day works are quite as much as the singing actors the expositors of the dramatic idea, and in the works of the other men whom I have mentioned they speak a language which a century ago was known only to the orchestras of Gluck and Mozart with their comparatively limited, yet eloquent, vocabulary.  Coupled with praise for the wonderful art of Mesdames Patti and Melba (and I am glad to have lived in their generation, though they do not represent my ideal in dramatic singing), we are accustomed to hear lamentations over the decay of singing.  I have intoned such jeremiads myself, and I do not believe that music is suffering from a greater want to-day than that of a more thorough training for singers.  I marvel when I read that Senesino sang cadences of fifty seconds’ duration; that Ferri with a single breath could trill upon each note of two octaves, ascending and descending, and that La Bastardella’s art was equal to a perfect performance (perfect in the conception of her day) of a flourish like this: 

[Sidenote:  La Bastardella’s flourish.]

[Music illustration]

[Sidenote:  Character of the opera a century and a half ago.]

[Sidenote:  Music and dramatic expression.]

I marvel, I say, at the skill, the gifts, and the training which could accomplish such feats, but I would not have them back again if they were to be employed in the old service.  When Senesino, Farinelli, Sassarelli, Ferri, and their tribe dominated the stage, it strutted with sexless Agamemnons and Caesars.  Telemachus, Darius, Nero, Cato, Alexander, Scipio, and Hannibal ran around on the boards as languishing lovers, clad in humiliating disguises, singing woful arias to their mistress’s eyebrows—­arias full of trills and scales and florid ornaments, but void of feeling as a problem in Euclid.  Thanks very largely to German influences, the opera is returning to its original purposes.  Music is again become a means of dramatic expression, and the singers who appeal to us most powerfully are those who are best able to make song subserve that purpose, and who to that end give to dramatic truthfulness, to effective elocution, and to action the attention which mere voice and beautiful utterance received in the period which is called the Golden Age of singing, but which was the Leaden Age of the lyric drama.