instrumentation, its prominent part for the bass or baritone, its long elaborate finale, and above all its military band on the stage! Mozart had already anticipated every resource that has since been adopted by Rossini, but to Rossini belongs, nevertheless, the merit of having brought the lyric drama to perfection on the Italian stage, and forty and even thirty years ago it was to Rossini that its supposed degradation was attributed. "So great a change," says Lord Mount Edgcumbe, "has taken place in the character of the (operatic) dramas, in the style of the music and its performance, that I cannot help enlarging on that subject before I proceed further. One of the most material alterations is, that the grand distinction between serious and comic operas is nearly at an end, the separation of the singers for their performance, entirely so.[83] Not only do the same sing in both, but a new species of drama has arisen, a kind of mongrel between them called _semi seria_, which bears the same analogy to the other two that that nondescript melodrama does to the legitimate tragedy and comedy of the English stage." And of which style specimens may be found in Shakespeare's plays and in Mozart's _Don Giovanni_! The union of the serious and the comic in the same lyric work was an innovation of Mozart's, like almost all the innovations attributed by Lord Mount Edgcumbe to Rossini. Indeed, nearly all the operatic reforms of the last three-quarters of a century that have endured, have had Mozart for their originator. [Sidenote: ROSSINI'S INNOVATIONS.] "The construction of these newly invented pieces," continues Lord Mount Edgcumbe, "is essentially different from the old. The dialogue which used to be carried on in recitative, and which in Metastasio's operas, is often so beautiful and interesting, is now cut up (and rendered unintelligible, if it were worth listening to), into _pezzi concertati_, or long singing conversations, which present a tedious succession of unconnected, ever-changing motivos, having nothing to do with each other: and if a satisfactory air is for a moment introduced, which the ear would like to dwell upon, to hear modulated, varied and again returned to, it is broken off before it is well understood, by a sudden transition into a totally different melody, time and key, and recurs no more; so that no impression can be made or recollection of it preserved. Single songs are almost exploded ... even the _prima donna_ who would formerly have complained at having less than three or four airs allotted to her, is now satisfied with one trifling _cavatina_ for a whole opera." * * * * *