Wagner was both a poet and a musician and combined poetry, music and pantomine painting. He is called the "reformer of opera", a "regenerator of modern drama". Wagner's great work aside from the leitmotiv was his work with recitative. Up to this time the recitative and the arias were dry, weak, barren and hampered every composer and poet. Up to his time the recitative aria and the ballet had undergone no organic change, though the aria had suffered many changes of fashion. He did not mean to sacrifice the beauty of sound in the Italian operas, but this had so far usurped the first place, while the dramatic motive which had inspired the invention of the opera. His works are not conspicuous for pure melody, for he considered the dramatic effect of chords and discords. He paid deference to the language employed and the vocal peculiarities of the people, for the German words were unintelligible when sung to the florid Italian tunes. He wrote the vocal parts of his lyric dramas to bring out the force of his poetry. He gave new expression to new ideas. Peri, in "Eurydice", concealed an orchestra behind the scenes. In Monteverde's "Orfeo", thirty-six different instruments were relegated to each personage. Wagner assigned an instrument or set of instruments to each person. His typical phrases are most interesting. He pictures the giants, in "Das Rheingold", with loud heavy octaves, the Nibelung, tricksters and schemers, with music of a descending figure, twothirds the interval of a seventh, the melodies of the Rhine with characteristic figures depicting slow undulation of water in its depths, flux and reflux of element, ripples on the surface and the motion of the swimmers. His "Rheingold" music is truly scenic. It begins with a single deep tone and then introduces instruments of a lighter color. The graduated augmentation of the wavy accompaniment and the doubly delineative spirit reflects the sinless quiet of the Golden Age. There are themes for mental states and the evil Alberich is represented by abrupt jerky music. The orchestra discourses mournfully of the renunciation of love. Loga is depicted by fitful chromatic phrases which crackle and flash thru the orchestra. The sword phrase consists of major harmonies over sustained pedal point, and the thunderstorm of rushing figures in bass, and staccato lightning in short rapid figures in lighter instruments, crashing of the wind in chromatic phrases, a hammering rythm for the Nibelung. Siegfried's boyhood is pictured as a wild forest lad with a hunting call, and when he gathers pieces of the spear the music accompaniment is in broken rythm.