Five months after this disappointment, in response to an invitation of Frederick William III of Prussia, he settled in Berlin, becoming director of the Royal Opera, with an excellent salary and plenty of leisure time. In spite of difficulties with the intendant, Count Brühl, he accomplished much. _Die Vestalin_, _Ferdinando Cortez_, and _Olympie_, prepared with inconceivable effort, were produced with great success in 1821. But in the same year Weber’s _Freischütz_, full of romantic fervor and directly appealing to the heart of the German nation, turned public favor away from Spontini. In _Nourmahal_ (1822), the libretto founded on Moore’s ‘Lalla Rookh,’ and _Alcidor_ (1825) Spontini evidently chose subjects of a more fanciful type in order to compete with Weber. His librettos were poor, however, and the purely romantic was unsuited to his mode of thought. In _Agnes von Hohenstaufen_, planned on a grander scale than any of his previous scores, he reverted again to his former style. It is beyond all doubt Spontini’s greatest work. In grandeur of style and imaginative breadth it excels both _La Vestale_ and _Ferdinando Cortez_. So thorough-going were Spontini’s revisions that when it was again given in Berlin in 1837 many who had heard it when first performed did not recognize it. Spontini’s suspicious and despotic nature, which made him almost impossible to get along with, led to his dismissal, though with titles and salary, in 1841. Thereafter he lived much in retirement and died in 1851. His music belonged essentially to the epic period of the first French empire. The wearied nations, after the fall of Napoleon, craved sensuous beauty of sound, lullabies, arias, cavatinas, tenderness, and wit rather than stateliness and grandeur. Thus the political conditions of the time favored Rossini’s success and, in a measure, at Spontini’s expense. Spontini was the direct precursor of Meyerbeer, who was to develop the ‘historical’ opera, to which the former had given distinction, with its large lines and stateliness of detail, its broadly human and heroic appeal, into the more melodramatic and violently contrasted type generally known as French ‘grand’ opera. * * * * *