There is another aspect to the symphonic poem, in which Liszt deviated from Wagner. In Wagner's operas there is plenty of descriptive or pictorial music, but no program music, properly speaking; for even in such things as the Ride of the Valkyries, or the Magic Fire Scene, the music does not depend on a programme, but is explained by the scenery. In programme music, on the other hand, the scene or the poetic idea is simply explained in the programme, or else merely hinted at in the title of the piece. Crude attempts in this direction were made centuries ago, but programme music as an important branch of music is a modern phenomenon. Beethoven encouraged it by his "Pastoral Symphony," and the French Berlioz did some very remarkable things in this line in his dramatic symphonies; but it remained for Liszt to hit the nail on the head in his symphonic poems. The French Saint-Saëns followed him, rather than his countryman Berlioz; so did Tschaikowsky, Dvorák, and most modern composers, up to Richard Strauss, whose symphonic poems are the most widely discussed, praised, and abused compositions of our time. To the great names contained in the preceding paragraphs another must be added,--that of an Italian. By an odd coincidence, Verdi was born in the same year as Wagner, 1813. But what is far more remarkable is that at the close of their careers, so different otherwise, these two great composers met again--in their music, Verdi as a Wagnerian convert. Up to his fifty-eighth year Verdi had written two dozen operas, all made up of strings of arias in the old-fashioned way,--superb arias, many of them, especially in "Il Trovatore" and "Aïda," but still arias. Then he rested from his labors sixteen years; and when he appeared on the stage again, with his "Otello" and "Falstaff," he had adopted Wagner's maxims that arias are out of place in a music-drama; that "the play's the thing," and that the music should follow the text word for word. Surely, this was the most remarkable of Wagner's triumphs and conquests. He who had been denounced for decades as being unable to write properly for the voice was actually taken up as a model by the greatest composer of Italy, the land of song. Moreover, all the young composers of Italy have turned their backs on the traditions of Italian opera. The chief ambition of Mascagni, Leoncavallo, Puccini, and all the others has been to be called "the Italian Wagner;" and their operas are much more like Wagner's than like Rossini's and Donizetti's, being free from arias and the vocal embroideries that formerly were the essence of Italian opera. The same is true of the operas written in recent decades in France, Germany, and other countries. Massenet, Saint-Saëns, Humperdinck, Goldmark, Richard Strauss, Paderewski, and all the others have followed in Wagner's footsteps.