There had been composed before the year 1600 the most beautiful sacred music the world possesses--that which culminated in the works of Palestrina. A style or method of expression had been perfected, and this style or method was gradually and naturally being applied to secular and even to dramatic forms. There were at that time, also, songs of the people which had been often used in plays with music, and which might have supplied a basis for opera. But the creators of the new opera would have none of these. They had a theory (fatal possession for any artist): they wanted to revive the Greek drama, and they believed that, in opera, music should be subservient to the text. It was Peri and his associates who first saw this will-o’-the-wisp, which has since become completely embodied into a fully equipped and valiant bugaboo to frighten and subdue those who love music for music’s sake. All that one needs to say on this point is that there is no great opera in existence, save alone “Pelléas et Mélisande” by Debussy, in which the music is not supreme over the text (and Debussy’s opera is unique in its treatment and leads nowhere--or, if anywhere, away from opera). Peri’s reforms were artistically unreasonable, but the composers who followed him gradually evolved what is called the aria or operatic song and did eventually make a more or less coherent operatic form, although a long time passed before opera unified in itself the various elements necessary to artistic completeness. It was only a short time, however, before opera attained the widest favor all over Europe, a favor which it has enjoyed from that day to this. The reasons for this never-waning popularity are found first in the natural preference on the part of the public for the human voice over any instrument. For whatever facility of technique or felicity of expression musical instruments may have, they lack the intimate human quality of the singing voice. The voice comes to the listener in terms of himself, whereas an instrument may be strange and unsympathetic and awaken no response. So complete is this sympathy between the singer and listener that almost any singer with a fine voice (she is, very likely, called a “human nightingale”) is sure to attract an audience, no matter what she sings or how little musical intelligence she shows. (It is this sympathy, too, which inflicts on us the drawing-room song, the last word in utter vacuity.) Coupled with this is the delight the public takes in extraordinary vocal feats of agility. The singer vies with a flute in the orchestra, or sings two or three notes higher than any other singer has ever sung, and the public crowds to hear her. But it is useless to dwell on this: the disease is incurable; there will always be, I fear, an unthinking public ready for any vocal gymnast who sings higher or faster than anybody else, or who can toss off trills and runs with a smiling face and a pretty costume, and in entirely unintelligible words.