It was not long before the charming Italian melody undertook the conquest of the Church. The popular demand for melody and solo singing overcame the austere traditions of ecclesiastical song. The dramatic and concert style invaded the choir gallery. The personnel of the choirs was altered, and women, sometimes male sopranos and altos, took the place of boys. The prima donna, with her trills and runs, made the choir gallery the parade ground for her arts of fascination. The chorus declined in favor of the solo, and the church aria vied with the opera aria in bravura and languishing pathos. Where the chorus was retained in mass, motet, or hymn, it abandoned the close-knit contrapuntal texture in favor of a simple homophonic structure, with strongly marked rhythmical movement. The orchestral accompaniment also lent to the composition a vivid dramatic coloring, and brilliant solos for violins and flutes seemed often to convert the sanctuary into a concert hall. All this was inevitable, for the Catholic musicians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were artists as well as churchmen; they shared the aesthetic convictions of their time, and could not be expected to forego the opportunities for effect which the new methods put into their hands. They were no longer dependent upon the Church for commissions; the opera house and the salon gave them sure means of subsistence and fame. The functions of church and theatre composers were often united in a single man. The convents and cathedral chapels were made training-schools for the choir and the opera stage on equal terms. It was in a monk’s cell that Bernacchi and other world-famous opera singers of the eighteenth century were educated. Ecclesiastics united with aristocratic laymen in the patronage of the opera; cardinals and archbishops owned theatre boxes, and it was not considered in the least out of character for monks and priests to write operas and superintend their performance. Under such conditions it is not strange that church and theatre reacted upon each other, and that the sentimental style, beloved in opera house and salon, should at last be accepted as the proper vehicle of devotional feeling.