With Gluck came the great reforms in Vienna, as elsewhere, and there, too, party feeling ran high, Gluck being warmly opposed by Hasse and his party. In Ritter’s admirable “History of Music,” already largely quoted from, whilst blaming the German princes for obtaining Italian operas at extravagant cost, he asks us to remember that these same princes “prepared the road, however unconsciously, for a Gluck, a Haydn, and a Mozart; for all these masters’ early efforts were rooted in the Italian school of music.” Germany all this time had no national opera, the Hamburg attempt failing for want of encouragement. As we have previously done in dealing with the other countries, so now we will glance at the lighter form of opera for a moment. The German _operette_, or _singspiel_, was brought into notice by Johann Adam Hiller about the middle of the eighteenth century. He produced numbers of these, full of charming original melodies, and with spoken dialogue, as in _opera comique_. Amongst several writers of these light works we may number Schweitzer, André, and Benda, who introduced the melodrama, in which dialogue is spoken during an undercurrent of expressive and illustrative music. There is also Johann Friedrich Reichardt, composing, at the end of the seventeenth century, a sort of _vaudeville_ known as the “Liederspiel.” Contemporary with these stand Dittersdorf and Haydn, and, in Southern Germany, Klauer, Schenk, and Müller. These small operas at first rather imitated the French school; but at the time of the above composers the national life and sentiment, in however insignificant a manner, had crept in, and the germ of a national type existed. At such a critical moment came the great genius who was to develop the elements of both serious and comic opera, and raise them to a lofty pedestal, and that genius was Mozart. Whilst accepting the forms of his day, he gave to them new life and meaning, and his illustration of each character, together with his masterly _ensembles_ and _finales_, in which, whilst each singer maintains his individuality, clearness is still pre-eminent, will ever abide as marvellous examples of dramatic scholarship and musical beauty. Besides understanding exactly what the human voice was capable of doing, he raised the orchestral accompaniment to a very high position. Whilst Gluck _attacked_ Italian opera, Mozart _moulded_ it in such a fashion that the old stiff traditions were no longer possible in Germany. At the commencement of this century, I must add to the list such names as Winter, Hummel the pianist, Weigl, Himmel, and, last and greatest, Beethoven, whose one opera, “Fidelio,” will endure in its pure nobility as long as music endures. The romantic school of poetry now finding its way into Germany, was soon aided by appropriate musical settings by Spohr, Marschner, and Weber—the greatest of them all. Of his operas, “Der Freischütz” is the finest, the most popular, and the most thoroughly German.