Puccini adds to Wagner's reform, with the peculiar style of modern French and Italian composers which alternates light and varied orchestration and melody, with harsh, almost crude instrumentation. He demonstrates that the orchestra may be made to interpret shades and transitions of rapid and subtle emotion, and he produced an actual musical diction with some of the finest passages for the orchestra alone. His sense of melody is supreme in his combination of Italian and German methods. His impressive manner of intensifying and underscoring dramatic moments in the action is unparalleled as is also his capacity for forceful and succinct orchestral commentary. He uses his music to paint scenes and makes continuous use of distinctive and rythmic melody and there is an absence of any definite characterization by means of a leitmotiv, for his work is lighter than that of Wagner's. He maintains that opera must have local color, so therefore we find an interweaving of American airs in his "Girl of the Golden West" and American and Japanese airs in "Madame Butterfly". His score is genuinely Puccinean and an influence of Debussy is betrayed in an harmonic way. The prelude to "Madame Butterfly" Is not an overture, though it does state some motives. His songs constantly contain one melody in the instrumental against the unrelated vocal part, and he reflects the modern moods and ideas in a score intricate in counterpoint, rich in embellishment, full of the melodic fluency of the Italian temperament and strength of the German school. The Japanese effects give beautiful lyric movements but they are not as great as Verdi's. There is intense dramatic vigor in "Manon Lescaut" which has spoken dialogue with running orchestral accompaniment and motives. "La Boheme" has neither overture nor intermezzo, and lacks sustained melody. Puccini is termed the only one with as much genius as Wagner, for he agrees that too much realism is cramping to good music, and he proves that music drama can be loosely constructed and need not conform to spoken drama standards.