VOL. XXVII.

No.

UNDATIONS.

ITH the epoch of mysticism culminating in Palestrina began the secularisation of music, effected by the Florentine opera composers and followed by the reign of pure music, that art of combining pure tones without words into an aesthetic whole the period of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.

When the possibilities of one sort of tone combination are exhausted, keen minds grasp an unused principle and inaugurate a new style. We know that the ecclesiastical, or first, period gave expression solely to religion; that the second period, the period of Italian opera, portrayed the joys and pleasures of life. To the Germans now remained the development of such tone combinations as sounded the depths of human passion and woe.

inence through the genius of Gluck, who initiated the revolutionary movement in the reform of Itaiian opera and who, though he was not the first to recognize its abuses, was the first, however, who possessed the ability and stamina necessary for so bold an undertaking. At this time the German operahouses were entirely given up to the vanity of the Italian singers and the French operas of Rameau, the latter, however, being dramatically earnest but musically dull. musically dull. Gluck, born in Bavaria in 1714, had been writing Italian operas for thirty years before he began his reforms, but it was not until 1746 that he was brought to a full realization of its weakness. At the request of some London admirers he arranged a "potpourri" of the most popular airs from his operas, and upon its utter failure, he now saw, to quote his own words, "that all efficient music must be the expression of some situation; that, in spite of melody and richness of harmony, if this vital quality be lacking only a vain medley of sounds tickle the ear, but never more deeply." Another incentive to reform lay in the prevalence of the Aristotelian idea that all art must imitate nature. Grimm, one of the musical authorities of the time, disapproved of duets, because, he said, two persons in real life did not talk at the same time without paying any attention to each other.

In the seventeenth century the Italian composers and virtuosi reigned supreme. in every department of music, and it was not until the advent of Gluck, Haydn and Mozart that the musical sceptre was wrested from their hands. The Italian school, with its fioriture, its easy, happy melodiousness of style, was attacked by the Germans in their use of heavy masses of tone. The rippling, sensuous style gave place to one more solid, serious-of greater fire and depth.

It was in the field of opera that the Germans first came into musical prom