With such material and upon so simple a basis was opera formed—an art construction which, in its more modern garb, has played a very important part in the history of European society. Of really great composers who advanced this _drama per musica_, one of the earliest and most important was Claudio Monteverde. He imbued it with his musicianship and originality, employing particular effects for each scene and for each character, his object being to unite the varying sentiment of the poem with his music. In his operas, the first of which was “Orfeo,” new and less cramped forms of accompaniment, giving singers greater freedom in dramatic action, followed such reforms as a better use of rhythm and more truthful illustration of sentiments, whilst an increased orchestral force was added to other means of expression. The Italian Church writers began to compose operas, and in the seventeenth century we find the recitation form receiving new vigour and truthfulness of detail at the hands of, amongst others, Cavalli (whose real name was Caletti-Bruni), Cesti, and Alessandro Scarlatti, Carissimi’s greatest pupil. Scarlatti did much for the opera. He is supposed to have invented the short interludes for instruments between the vocal phrases, and he certainly introduced the first complete form of aria, known as the “Scarlatti-form,” which, however, with its tiresomely exact repetitions, seems to us quite artificial, and anything but dramatic. About his time _recitativo_, as we know it, was separated from the _aria parlante_. Succeeding Scarlatti, came the pupils of his Neapolitan school, amongst whom were Durante, Buononcini, Porpora, Jomelli, and others, and with them we reach a period during which the opera-form sadly deteriorated. Composers had broken away from the ecclesiastical forms—nay, more, the chorus had become of no importance, but, instead, the new aria, which might have taken an advantageous position as a means for occasional soliloquy and meditation, without interference with the dramatic story, now usurped the place of the latter altogether, and an opera meant nothing more than a string of arias in set form, an excuse for showing off the best voices to the greatest advantage, the most successful work being that one which pandered most to the vanity of the singers, who altered and embellished the melodies of their mechanical slave, the composer. Dramatic significance was fast disappearing, and a reformer was sadly needed, and that reformer appeared early in the eighteenth century in the person of Gluck, a Bohemian, who, after studying in Italy and writing several operas after the traditional Italian models, settled in Vienna, and there worked out his great ideas of regeneration and reform.