It must be understood that Lulli's recitative was not always dramatically correct. Sometimes it is merely grandiose in style, but it is much more animated, flexible, and capable of expression than that of his predecessors. Lulli was undoubtedly influenced in his solo writing by the works of Monteverde, which were performed in Paris under the direction of Cavalli. Lulli is said to have written some of the ballet music which had to be inserted in these works to please the Parisians. The love of ballet has never died out in France. It was a fight over it which killed Wagner's "Tannhäuser" in Paris in 1861. Lulli's early training naturally made him an eclectic, and when he set out to provide the Parisian public with grand operas to its taste, he chose from French ballet and Italian opera such features as he believed would be popular, and upon these as a foundation reared a new version of the Greek drama, thoroughly Gallic in its conception. Courtier, man of the world, and self-seeker, Lulli knew how to plan an opera, with such musical materials as there were in his day, so that it should present some effect of contrast and shape. For one thing, he fairly rid himself of everything pertaining to the ecclesiastical style of composition. As I have said, he wrote arias, but their indistinctness is owing largely to the fact that the conventional form had not yet become fully established. It is, perhaps, in the general plan of his operas that Lulli shows the most important advance over his predecessors. He was certainly far ahead of Peri, Monteverde, Cavalli, Beaujoyeux, and Cambert in the manner in which he distributed his scenes so as to give variety of emotion, and in the effective way in which he arranged the succession of recitatives, arias, choruses, and ballets. The plan was, indeed, designed wholly with a view to stage effectiveness, and thereby led away from the dramatic directness of Peri; but on the other hand Lulli's music followed the development of his story with much sincerity. The breadth and force of the recitative in many places suggest that the public taste to which he catered was by no means to be despised.