His music, however, abounds in strong and varied rhythms and in a generally richer style. Previous to his time, for instance, the French composers accompanied the voices with strings in five parts, and flutes and oboes in two parts. Rameau insisted upon giving each instrument a special part, and he introduced the now familiar custom of writing solo passages for the different wood wind instruments. He also greatly improved the character of the choral writing in French opera. But Rameau was not highly skilled in writing for the voice. He recognized that fact himself when it was too late for him to remodel his style. And he had a foolish idea that a good composer could set any kind of a libretto to music. Many of his works failed to please the Parisians simply because their books were so weak. But on the whole, Rameau left his mark on the French opera. There can be no doubt that so great a composer as Gluck learned much from him, and he must at any rate be credited with a faithful preservation of those principles of the real grand opera style which entered the French school at its inception and which have never wholly departed from it. It was the influence of such works as his that prepared Paris to receive the sincere dramatic operas of Gluck, the next composer of importance in the line of development of French opera. Chapter XXII The Reforms of Gluck His early Italian operas--His conversion and the cold reception of his new ideas in Vienna--Recognized in Paris as Rameau's successor--The conquest of Piccini--Gluck's theory of the lyric drama--How he developed it in practice--His immediate successors and imitators. In spite of the labors of Rameau the prevailing style of Italian opera gained a footing in Paris, where its cheap melody and direct appeal to the unthinking gave it a dangerous popularity. Its unreality, its dramatic infidelity, and above all its exaltation of the singer above the composer, went far toward leading the Parisians astray from the true opera given them by Lulli and Rameau. It required the work of a man of true genius, guided by the sincere dramatic purposes of the earlier composers, to restore opera in France to its position of artistic nobility and to fix it there. The man who achieved this was Christopher Willibald Gluck, who turned to Paris only when he found that his work failed of appreciation elsewhere.