=Italian Composers in France and Germany=.—The popularity of Italian opera outside of Italy led to the expatriation of many Italian composers who exercised a powerful influence in France and Germany. Among these =Antonio Salieri= (1750-1825) deserves mention for his career in Vienna, where he was the successful rival of Mozart in court favor and later the teacher of Beethoven. More important was =Luigi Cherubini= (1760-1842), who found his way to Paris just before the Revolution. A master of the severe contrapuntal school, which was then passing away, Beethoven considered him the first composer of the day for the stage and studied his works zealously. Cherubini was present at the first performance of _Fidelio_, which shows strong traces of the influence exerted upon Beethoven by _Les Deux Journées_ (The Two Days, known in Germany and England as The Water Carrier), Cherubini’s greatest opera. The two were on intimate terms during the stay of the latter in Vienna for the purpose of bringing out several of his operas. There was much in common between them; the Italian had the solidity, dignity and nobility of treatment generally associated with the German character. Beethoven’s choice of a subject for his opera was doubtless influenced by _Les Deux Journées_; the themes of both are much the same, involving devotion and self-sacrifice of the highest order. =Spontini and Rossini=.—Another Italian composer who went first to France and afterward to Germany was =Gasparo Spontini= (1774-1851), who with _La Vestale_ (The Vestal) enlarged the sphere of the opera in Paris. Spectacular and pompous in character, sonorous and powerful in instrumentation, it pointed directly to the type of grand opera originated by Meyerbeer nearly a generation later. In 1820, he was summoned to Berlin, where he remained as court composer and conductor for twenty-two years, a period coincident with the most significant development of the German school of opera. Spontini was the last of the many Italians who had for a century and a half borne almost uninterrupted sway in Germany. The most brilliant and gifted of all these wandering sons of Italy was =Gioacchino Rossini= (1792-1868). As rich in melody as Mozart, though of a less refined type, he owed more to nature than to study. His first successful opera, _Tancredi_ (1813), set all Italy agog with the freshness and vivacity of its airs, and it was not long before he was the most popular composer in Europe. Gifted with prodigious facility—in one period of eight years he wrote twenty operas—his operas ruled all stages and fixed the standard by which all others were judged. [Illustration: GIOACCHINO ROSSINI.]