Under these conditions the mass in the modern musical era has taken a variety of directions and assumed distinct national and individual complexions. The Neapolitan school, which gave the law to Italian opera in the eighteenth century, endowed the mass with the same soft sensuousness of melody and sentimental pathos of expression, together with a dry, calculated kind of harmony in the chorus portions, the work never touching deep chords of feeling, and yet preserving a tone of sobriety and dignity. As cultivated in Italy and France the mass afterward degenerated into rivalry on equal terms with the shallow, captivating, cloying melody of the later Neapolitans and their successors, Rossini and Bellini. In this school of so-called religious music all sense of appropriateness was often lost, and a florid, profane treatment was not only permitted but encouraged. Perversions which can hardly be called less than blasphemous had free rein in the ritual music. Franz Liszt, in a letter to a Paris journal, written in 1835, bitterly attacks the music that flaunted itself in the Catholic churches of the city. He complains of the sacrilegious virtuoso displays of the prima donna, the wretched choruses, the vulgar antics of the organist playing galops and variations from comic operas in the most solemn moments of the holy ceremony. Similar testimony has from time to time come from Italy, and it would appear that the most lamentable lapses from the pure church tradition have occurred in some of the very places where one would expect that the strictest principles would be loyally maintained. The most celebrated surviving example of the consequences to which the virtuoso tendencies in church music must inevitably lead when unchecked by a truly pious criticism is Rossini’s Stabat Mater. This frivolous work is frequently performed with great _éclat_ in Catholic places of worship, as though the clergy were indifferent to the almost incredible levity which could clothe the heart-breaking pathos of Jacopone’s immortal hymn—a hymn properly honored by the Church with a place among the five great Sequences—with strains better suited to the sprightly abandon of opera buffa.