Roughly speaking, the opera had its beginnings in the dance, but almost at the same time it travelled along the road of the development of vocal expression by music. As early as the days of Peri and Caccini, who reverted to the old Greek drama as the basis on which to build something anew, and by so doing brought forth the germ which was afterwards to bear fruit through Gluck and Wagner, the feeling for freedom of expression, the desire to snatch music away from the tyranny of a set form--counterpoint, as it was then understood--strove to make itself felt and understood. It must not be taken to mean that the old contrapuntists did not endeavour to combine the adherence to a form with some degree of definite expression; for in the works of one of the greatest of this school, old Josquin des Près, are to be found plenty of emotional touches by which, even in so restricted a pattern as the madrigal form, it was plain that a closer union between words and music--an emotional feeling, in short--was clearly the thing striven for. Still dealing briefly with beginnings, one may point to the dramatic cantatas--particularly in Italy, but found in France as well--or madrigal plays, by which, in distinction to what may be called little comedies with music, this essential "operatic" feature in the union of the arts of speech and song, comes out with special clearness. In Italy then, the land which owns Puccini as one of its most distinguished sons, the opera had its rise; and in _Dafne_, the first child of a new art, it is curious to note, it immediately turned aside into one of those many by-paths which led it very far away from the goal of its promise. Curious again is the reason for its first fall--the desire of the leading singer for vocal display, and the introduction of long vocal flourishes, which, having nothing to do with the case, yet pleased the public mightily. In this _Dafne_--the score of which has been lost--it was the great singer Archilei who was the offender. Yet again a strange thing comes down to us after these many years. Peri, the composer, was highly delighted with the interpolations and the vocal gymnastics. But out of something dead, something very much alive was destined to develop. The old Greek drama was not to be resuscitated by a sort of transfusion of blood--music, the newest and most emotional of the arts, being the medium to carry life into the structure. There is not space here to do more than hint at the various fresh phases--the reforms, as they have been called--each of which, in trying to deal with what was already built up, really brought to an achievement the ideal which had floated before many a worker in the same field.