=Gluck and Mozart Compared=.—It was not until _Idomeneo, Re di Creta_ (Idomeneus, King of Crete) was brought out during the Carnival season of 1781, that he demonstrated fully the gifts which made him the first dramatic composer of his time. In this he shows a great advance over the conventional opera of the period and an approach to the ideals of Gluck, though neither in _Idomeneo_ nor in any of his later operas did he attempt to embody these ideals in the uncompromising form chosen by the older master. Though contemporaries, no two composers could well be more unlike in character, temperament and methods than Gluck and Mozart. The one, a man of years, ripened through travel and study, conditioned his music according to the requirements of the drama; the other, a youth of no great intellectual endowments aside from his art, but aflame with the fire of genius, felt the drama in terms of music. Thus they approached the task from opposite sides. Not that Gluck was without feeling or Mozart without intellect; it was simply a case of the dramatist and the musician solving the problem each in his own way. At the same time it was impossible that Gluck’s theories should be entirely without influence on Mozart. Even a genius must learn from his environment, and Gluck’s position, though sharply disputed by the Italian school to which Mozart belonged, could not be ignored by the younger man. Then, too, Mozart had been in Paris during the height of the Gluck-Piccini controversy, and it is known that he had made a close study of _Alceste_, to which Gluck, in the form of a dedication to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, had given a preface containing a clear exposition of his principles of dramatic composition. It is hard to say, however, what direction Mozart’s dramatic course might have taken had his life not been cut so pitilessly short and if his outward circumstances had been less constrained. He was obliged to adapt himself to Italian influences which at that time were all powerful.