German opera reached an extraordinary development during the nineteenth century, the distinguishing characteristics being an extremely full and dramatically conceived treatment of the orchestra, and a mode of delivering the text partaking of the character of melody and recitative in about equal proportions, the entire object being to present the action to the inner consciousness of the beholder in the most impressive manner possible. In Italian opera, as we have seen, there was a large development of arias and vocal pieces, whose value lay in their beauty as melodies and as concerted effect, the action of the drama being meanwhile delayed sometimes for an entire half hour, while these pieces were going on. In Germany the effort to improve the delivery of the text and to bring it into closer union with the orchestra, and to develop the music from a dramatic standpoint exclusively, led to the vocal form known as _arioso_, or, to use Wagner's term, "endless melody," in which the successive periods follow each other to the end of the paragraph, or the end of the piece, without a full stop at any point until the end of the sense is reached. The great master of this form of composition was Richard Wagner, who may be regarded as the exponent of the extreme development yet reached by German opera. Wagner's endless melody proposed to itself the same ideal as that of Gluck, but it is only at rare moments that one will find in the music of the later master the symmetrical periods of the Gluck and Mozart epoch. Italian opera, as we have already seen, carried forward the dialogue mostly in _recitativo-secco_, that is to say, in a recitative following more or less successfully the modulations of speech, and accompanied only by detached chords marking the emphatic moments. This form of vocal delivery has the slightest possible musical interest, and the Germans almost immediately endeavored to improve it, as also did some of the Italian masters, the first result being _recitativo-stromentato_, or instrumented recitative, viz., recitative in which the text is accompanied by a flowing and more or less descriptive orchestral accompaniment. This differs essentially from the descriptive recitative in the works of the Mozart or Gluck period, or even in those of Haydn's later time. In the "Creation," for example, the descriptive recitative consists of vocal phrases with instrumental phrases interspersed, in dialogue form. The voice announces a certain fact and the orchestra immediately answers with a musical phrase corresponding to it, as, for example, in the recitative describing the creation of the world, where the phrase relating to the horse is immediately answered by an orchestral gallop; that of the tiger by certain slides and leaps in the melody remotely answering it; while the roar of the lion is immediately answered by a vigorous snort of the bass trombone. This is by no means of the same nature as the