In 1862 the Gewandhaus directors made a great concession; they invited Richard Wagner to conduct his "Tannhäuser Overture" at one of their concerts. This was a fatal mistake, for his triumph was complete, and their influence as opponents of the "music of the future" was correspondingly weakened. I have discussed Leipzig at such length, not because it was Wagner's birthplace, but because from this town, with all its intolerance and smallness, started the only short road to success. Leipzig's endorsement was a universally accepted voucher. Wagner had found this direct path barred, and his wanderings in surmounting or circumventing obstacles lasted for a long series of years, but his faith remained steadfast, and he reached the goal of his ambition a far stronger man because of the difficulties he had overcome. His appearance at the Gewandhaus was only a station on his course to already assured success, and not his starting-point. Wagner found opera a succession of solo, ensemble, and chorus pieces, strung upon plots often too slender to give them coherence. Texts had been made subservient to music, and that, in turn, to the singer's convenience and ambition for display. Operas were written as early as the thirteenth century, but Cherubini was the first Italian, and Gluck the first German, to produce works that have survived. Cherubini was followed by Rossini, a man of genius, but too indolent to fully develop his gifts. Had his beautiful sensuous melodies been put into richer settings, had more earnest thought been added to his spontaneity, his operas would have taken their places among the undying creations. Flashes of genius ultimately tire. It is the steady light of genius, fed by knowledge and earnestness (as in Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann), that can hold the world's attention restfully, which means perpetually. Bellini, with "Norma" and "Sonnambula," and Donizetti, with "Lucia di Lammermoor" and "Lucretia Borgia," still hold a place on the operatic stage, but their grasp is weakening. Verdi was the best equipped of all Italian opera composers, and his "Trovatore," with it rare gems, will crown his memory to the end of musical time. His later works, "Aida," "Othello," and "Falstaff," written under the influence of the Wagner period, are quite different from his earlier operas in instrumentation and in treatment of themes. In them he is more logical and stronger, but less sensuous. They furnish the first instances of Italian music dressed in foreign garb; of Italian music written under pressure from without. It has until recently been Italy's province to shed influence over the musical world. I construe Verdi's concessions to Wagner as the strongest possible endorsement of the latter's ideas. No other composer was in position to pay such tribute to Wagner's forceful and far-reaching art sense.