di Figaro” opera writers will soon be turning to learn the methods of dramatic characterization.  Pure beauty lives in angelic wedlock with psychological expression in Mozart’s dramatic music, and these factors will act as powerful loadstones in bringing composers who are now laboriously and vainly seeking devices for characterization in tricks and devices based on arbitrary formulas back to the gospel of truth and beauty.  Wagner has had no successful imitator.  His scheme of thematic identification and development, in its union of calculation, reflection, and musical inspiration, is beyond the capacities of those who have come after him.  The bow of Ulysses is still unbent; but he will be a great musician indeed who shall use the resources of the new art with such large ease, freedom, power, and effectiveness as Mozart used those of the comparatively ingenuous art of his day.  And yet the great opera composer who is to come in great likelihood will be a disciple of Gluck, Mozart, and the Wagner who wrote “Tristan und Isolde” and “Die Meistersinger” rather than one of the tribe of Debussy.

The great opera composers of the nineteenth century were of one mind touching the greatness of “Don Giovanni.”  Beethoven was horrified by its licentious libretto, but tradition says that he kept before him on his writing-table a transcript of the music for the trombones in the second finale of the opera.  Shortly after Mme. Viardot-Garcia came into possession of the autograph score of the masterpiece, Rossini called upon her and asked for the privilege of looking at it, adding, “I want to bow the knee before this sacred relic.”  After poring over a few pages, he placed his hands on the book and said, solemnly:  “He is the greatest, the master of them all; the only composer who had as much science as he had genius, and as much genius as he had science.”  On another occasion he said to a questioner:  “Vous voulez connaitre celui de mes ouvrages que j’aime le mieux; eh bien, c’est ‘Don Giovanni.’” Gounod celebrated the centenary of the opera by writing a commentary on it which he dedicated to young composers and artists called upon to take part in performances of the opera.  In the preface of his book he characterizes it as “an unequalled and immortal masterpiece,” the “apogee of the lyrical drama,” a “wondrous example of truth, beauty of form, appropriateness of characterization, deep insight into the drama, purity of style, richness and restraint in instrumentation, charm and tenderness in the love passages, and power in pathos”—­in one word, a “finished model of dramatic music.”  And then he added:  “The score of ‘Don Giovanni’ has exercised the influence of a revelation upon the whole of my life; it has been and remains for me a kind of incarnation of dramatic and musical impeccability.  I regard it as a work without blemish, of uninterrupted perfection, and this commentary is but the humble testimony of my Veneration and gratitude for the genius