Italian influence had almost caused the decline of French opera when Christopher Willibald Gluck turned to Paris, in 1774, as its regenerator.  In Vienna, twelve years earlier, he had already produced his “Orfeo,” whose calm, classic grandeur seemed the embodiment of the Greek art spirit.  His choice of subjects indicates the enterprise on which he had embarked.  He sought simplicity, subjugation of music to poetic sentiment, dramatic sincerity and organic unity.  His operatic version of Racine’s “Iphigenie en Aulide” called forth unbounded enthusiasm in the French metropolis directly after his arrival, and led to the warfare with the brilliant Italian Piccini, which was as hot as any Wagner controversy.

The homage of all time is due this man of genius for the splendid courage with which he attacked shams.  He claimed it to be the divine right of the dramatic composer to have his works sung precisely as he had written them, and protested against the innovations that had been permitted to suit the caprices and gratify the vanity of singers.  It was his idea that the Sinfonia, in other words the Overture or Prelude, should indicate the subject and prepare the spectators for the characters of the pieces, and that the instrumental coloring should be adapted to the mood of the situation, thus anticipating modern procedure.  He prepared the way for the work of Cherubini, Auber, Gounod, Thomas, Massenet, Saint-Saens and others.

In Germany, Italian opera, early introduced, long remained fashionable.  Native dramatic tastes, once fostered by minnesingers and strolling players, were kept alive by the “singspiel,” or song-play, composed of spoken dialogue and popular song, which furnished the actual beginnings of German national music drama.  The threshold of this was reached, the sanctuary of its treasures unlocked, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who, without thought of being a reformer, unconsciously infused German spirit into Italian forms.  It was during the last five years of his brief life, from 1786 to 1791, that he produced his operatic masterpieces, “The Marriage of Figaro,” “Don Giovanni,” and “The Magic Flute.”  His marvelous musical and poetic genius, supported by profound scholarship, led him into hitherto untried regions of expression, and to him it was given to bring humanity on the stage, splendidly depicting the inner being of each character in tones.  Wagner said of him that he had instinctively found dramatic truth and had cast brilliant light on the relations of musician and poet.

Ludwig van Beethoven, the great tone-poet, guided by his profound comprehension of the deep things of life and his active sympathies to absolute truthfulness in delineating human passions, made the next advance in his one opera, “Fidelio,” written in 1805.  Ranked, though it is, rather as a symphony for voice and orchestra than as the musical complement of a dramatic poem, there is nevertheless infused into some of its chief numbers more potent dramatic expression than is found in any previous opera.  Thoroughly cosmopolitan in subject, it is nevertheless German in that its lofty earnestness of tone offers a protest against all shallowness and sensationalism.  The entire story of the opera is told in tones in the overture.