thereby holding the music drama more or less in the state it was in a hundred years ago (every critic and almost every composer will tell you that any modern opera can be sung according to the laws of bel canto, and enough singers exist, unfortunately, to justify this assertion), save that the music is not so well sung, according to the old standards, as it was then. No singer has possessed enough courage to entirely defy tradition, to refuse to study with a teacher, to embody her own natural ideas in the performance of music, to found a new school . . . but there have been many rebels.
The operas of Mozart, Bellini, Donizetti, and Rossini, on the whole, do not demand great histrionic exertion from their interpreters and for a time singers trained in the old Handelian tradition met every requirement of these composers and their audiences. If more action were demanded than in Handel's day, the newer music, in compensation, was easier to sing. Nevertheless, early in the nineteenth century we observe that those artists who, pushing on to the new technique, strove to be actors as well as singers lost something of the old vocal facility. I need only speak of Ronconi and Mme. Pasta. The lady was admittedly the greatest lyric artist of her day, although it is recorded that her slips from true intonation were frequent. When she
