It would be hard today to point to the music of any other Italian master which has endured through radical changes of style and taste and has lost nothing; or indeed to that of the masters of any nation. Yet no subsequent developments have made a single quality of these sonatas dim or stale. The reason may be found in the just proportion in them of all the elements of music. The forms are slight; but they are graceful and secure, and there is not in the emotional quality of Corelli’s music that which calls for wider expression than they afford. The treatment of the violin shows a knowledge of it and a love of its qualities, tempered always by a respect and love for music as an art of expression. Therefore there is no phrase which is not in accord with the spirit and the law of the piece in which it is written, nothing which, written then for the sake of display, may make a feeble show in the light of modern technique. There is no abandonment to melody at the cost of other qualities; nor even a momentary forgetfulness of the pleasure of the ear in the exercise of the mind. Nothing has come into music in the course of two hundred years which can stand between us and a full appreciation of their beauty. This can hardly be said of the music of his contemporaries, three of whom, however, have lived to the present day, and one in more than name. Tommaso Albinoni (1674-1745) and Giuseppe Torelli (d. 1708) were both important in the establishment of the form of solo concerto which J. S. Bach acquired from Vivaldi.[48] Albinoni was a Venetian dilettante and spent most of his life in Venice in connection with the opera. Besides the fifty-one operas which he wrote, there are several instrumental works, from some of which Bach appropriated themes. A beautiful sonata in D minor has been edited by Alfred Moffat and published in a _Kammer-Sonaten_ series (B. Schott’s Söhne, Mainz). Notice the cadenza at the end of the slow movement. Torelli was a native of Bologna, but he spent at one time a few years in Vienna and also a year or two in Ansbach. Antonio Vivaldi, likewise a Venetian, is one of the most significant composers in the history of musical form, and was second only to Corelli as a composer for the violin and a player, if indeed he was not fully Corelli’s equal. Among his works are eighteen sonatas for solo violin and bass, opus 2 and opus 5, and a great number of concertos for a single violin and a varying number of accompanying instruments. Commonly it is said that much of Vivaldi’s music is touched with the falseness of virtuosity; and to this is laid the fact that his work has been forgotten while Corelli’s has lived. The fact itself cannot be denied. Yet there is a fine breadth and dignity in some of the concertos and in the sonatas, and warmth in the slow movements. He died in 1743 as director of a school for girls in Venice. On account of his red hair and his rank as priest he was known as _il prete rosso_.