It marks a transition from Moscheles, Dussek and Clementi to Thalberg and Liszt. The "Invitation to the Dance," moreover, was the first _salon_ piece idealized from a popular dance form. III. Yet another distinguished name might well have been enrolled among those of the great virtuosi of the first part of the nineteenth century. Jacob Liebmann Beer, better known as Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791-1864), was born at Berlin, the son of a rich Jewish banker. The name Meyer was prefixed to his own later, as a condition of inheriting certain property from a distant relative. As the boy showed talent for music at a very early age, he was put to the study of the pianoforte, and it was his ambition to distinguish himself as a virtuoso, which his talent undoubtedly permitted, if he had not been diverted from it by the success of his early attempts at opera. He was taught by a pupil of Clementi, and for a while by Clementi himself, as well as by other distinguished teachers, and if reports are to be believed concerning his playing, he must have become by the time he was twenty years old one of the very first virtuosi in Europe. His studies in theory were carried on under Abbe Vogler, at Darmstadt, where he was a schoolmate with C.M. von Weber and Gansbacher, and later with Salieri at Vienna. At Darmstadt he wrote an oratorio "God and Nature," which was performed by the _Singakademie_, of Berlin, in 1811; and an opera, "_Alimelek_" ("The Two Caliphs"), which also was successfully given at Munich in the Grand Opera House in the same year, 1811. Both works were anonymous. The opera made considerable reputation, and was played in several other cities. Upon Salieri's direction he went to Venice, where he arrived in 1815, to find Rossini's star in the ascendant, and all Venice, and Italy as well, wild over the bewitching melodies of "_Tancredi_." Meyerbeer, having that vein of cleverness and adaptability so characteristic of his race, immediately became a composer of Italian operas, and produced in Venice, "_Romilda e Constanza_" (Padua, 1815), "_Semiramide Riconosciuta_" (Turin, 1819), "_Emma di Resburgo_" (Venice, 1820), the latter also making a certain amount of reputation in Germany as "_Emma von Leicester_." Then followed "_Margherita d'Anjou_" (Milan, _La Scala_, 1820), "_L'Esule di Granata_" (Milan, 1822) and "_Il Crociato in Egitto"_ (Venice, 1824). All of these were Italian operas, with melody in quite the Rossini vein, with the same attention as Rossini to the light, the pleasing and the vocal, but with a certain added element of German cleverness of harmony and thematic treatment. [Illustration: Fig. 77. GIACOMO MEYERBEER.]