Take any of Verdi’s operas previous to those of 1850, and what do we get? A string of passionate tunes bracketed in the conventional _cavatina-cabaletta_ style; little attempt at following the book—such awful books!—and the orchestra, a huge strumming machine, strumming without color, appositeness, rhyme, or reason. And then the febrile, simian-like restlessness of the music. It was written for people of little musical intelligence, people who must hum a tune or ever after view it with contempt. Verdi could furnish tunes by the hundred—real, vital, dramatic ones. Think of the waste, the saddening waste, of material made by the young maestro in Oberto, Nabucco, I Lombardi, Ernani, I Due Foscari, Attila, Macbeth, Luisa Miller, and I Masnadieri! If he could have but saved them for his latter days—for his so-called third period! I know that your early Verdian refuses to consider the later music. He even listens to Aïda under protest. In it lurks the Wagnerian _Wurm_ that in Otello and Falstaff stings to death the melodic genius of the venerable master. Now, I quarrel with no man’s artistic tastes. It were a futile proceeding. If you love Rigoletto better than Otello, I have no objection to make. I cannot bring any argument to bear upon you, for I am not a special pleader in matters musical. As well try to convince a man who asserts that Dumas père is a greater novelist than Flaubert. Yet I enjoy certain moments in Rigoletto, just as I think The Three Guardsmen rattling good reading. But to call either the opera or the romance great art is to mix your critical values. Verdi was not by nature a reformer. A man of sensual gifts in the way of music-making, a born dramatizer of anything from an antique ruin to a murder, he took up the operatic form as he found it and did not seek to develop it. But he poured into its ancient, honorable, and somewhat shaky mould stuff of a stirring nature—and also an amazing amount of it. Think of the twenty-five and more operas he made before he reached Aïda! To be sure, there is a suspicious resemblance between his melodies, his characters, his situations; there is always the blood-curdling story of intrigue,—political, passionate,—with its elopements, loves, cutthroat conspirators, booted chorus, and its orchestral tremolo. We get the dime novel set to music, the inartistic glorification of the melodrama. Verdi needed money, love, fame, easily gained, and being a much more industrious man than Rossini he contrived to turn out in forty years twice as many musical pot-boilers. I have always admired Rossini’s musical laziness. Once rich, he refused to compose any more. As his facility was on a par with his lack of artistic conscience, the thought of the amount he might have left makes one shudder. But luckily he was content to give us—not to mention any of the others—The Barber of Seville, a masterpiece pure and undefiled.