considerable other music, especially many cantatas and small stage-works, some choruses and ballades, and some striking orchestral overtures and marches, besides much piano music (not published).
His personality offers much singularity. His mind was highly trained and well stored. He was a persistent student and experimenter, subjecting some of his works to an exasperating amount of revision. He had intense artistic ambition, supported by a florid and grandiose imagination, and much capacity for flights of beauty and tragic power. Yet he was extraordinarily susceptible to circumstances and suggestions, so that his manner was vacillating, indecisive, inconsistent and at times timid. He was eager for showy effects and unscrupulous about how he secured them. His over-anxiety to capture his audience and his seeming want of assurance about his own convictions kept him from being a genius of the highest order, though his power to grasp grand conceptions, to build up impressive scenes and to handle the orchestra seemed to offer materials for a nobler achievement than he actually won. But the clever use of his talents gave him for a time a commanding place in the musical world, driving Rossini from his eminence and, with him, holding back the transition to Wagner.
179. Opera-Singers and Librettists.—With the changes that now began to come over the operatic world the artistic importance of both vocalists and librettists became perceptibly greater. To be sure, the old tyranny of the singers was broken, so that they no longer dictated to the composer what and how he should write, but, on the other hand, new possibilities of dramatic and musical coöperation with the composer were opened. The score now became something to be really interpreted and portrayed, and, while the chances for vocal display were not lessened, the average amount of genuine stage-ability demanded was decidedly increased. Hence the greater operatic stars now began to show a more varied lustre, involving a fuller participation in the light and warmth of the composers themselves. Every advance in the dramatic intensity of operatic style involved heavier demands upon the performers as many-sided artists.
The work of preparing texts, also, now acquired a fresh distinction, since it was becoming clear that mere hack work, without dramatic insight and poetic tact, did not supply the materials for the strongest operatic effects. Occasionally superior music might triumph over the emptiness or foolishness of its text, but normally the two factors should work together and be fused into a real unity. Hence now a few writers of opera-books began to stand out as efficient agents in the growth of the musical drama upon modern lines.
