The Wagnerian enthusiasm in Italy is, however, more of an outward manifestation than an inner power in the life and feelings of the inhabitants of the Apennine peninsula. Even if the fascinating and intoxicating orchestral coloring of the great Bayreuth master is not without effect on the sensuous Italian, his music cannot be fully understood until a regular and thorough study of the classic composers, including Schumann, shall have become a second nature with the Italians. Meanwhile the realists, having invaded literary and artistic France, found their way over the Alps, and many ardent emulators of their methods are to be found among Italian artists. Cremona and Domenico Morelli among the painters, and the two daring Sicilian authors, Giovanni Verga and Luigi Capuana, have been the chief representatives of the movement. About 1878, Verga published a volume of Sicilian peasant sketches, powerful and attractive, imbued with the warm and realistic coloring of his native soil. Curiously enough, these clever little sketches, which bear in themselves the germ of effective libretti, had never been made to serve for operatic plots, probably on account of their small dimensions and too realistic contents, until a strange contingency led many young composers to make use of them. The music publisher, Sonzogno of Milan, a man of great wealth and enterprise, having for a considerable time been aware of the fruitless attempts of young national composers to produce their operas, instituted a competition for short operas in one act. About ten of the competitors went to Verga's rich novel-collection for the plot of their musical compositions. As everybody knows, Pietro Mascagni was the fortunate winner with his now world-famous "Cavalleria rusticana." The subject is a happy one for a one-act opera. Within a very short space of time a powerful dramatic action, with all the glowing and varied Southern coloring, takes place. It is the old, old story, already a thousand times told, of love's conquest and faithlessness, and the natural tragic consequences. The scene is laid in a country of daggers and stiletti. There is no practical use in applying the critical dissecting knife to prove that the enormous success with which the "Cavalleria" met was disproportionate to the real value of the work. We think that never since the beginning of opera has a work by a youthful composer had such a large and international popularity, bringing at the same time nearly an independent fortune to the composer. Before Mascagni competed for the Sonzogno prize his little family was actually starving, and he had not money enough to hire the piano so necessary to the exercise of his profession. [Illustration: PIETRO MASCAGNI. Reproduction of a lithograph portrait.]