Rossini's innovations are well described by Lord Mount-Edgcumbe, who has no praise, however, to bestow upon them, but on the contrary, condemns them without measure. Indeed, the more he blames Rossini, the more he calls attention to what are now recognised as his chief merits. When Lord Mount-Edgcumbe undertakes to show how Rossini was ruining the musical drama, he in fact points out how he was reforming it. "So great a change," he writes, "has taken place in the character of the (operatic) dramas, in the style of the music and its performance, that I cannot help enlarging upon that subject before we proceed further. One of the most material alterations is that the grand distinction between serious and comic operas is nearly at an end, the separation of the singers for their performances entirely so. Not only do the same sing in both, but a new species of drama has arisen, a kind of mongrel between them, called _semi-seria_, which bears the same analogy to the other two that the nondescript melodrama does to the legitimate tragedy and comedy of the English stage. The construction of these newly invented pieces," continues Lord Mount-Edgcumbe, "is essentially different from the old. The dialogue, which used to be carried on in recitative, and which in Metastasio's operas is often so beautiful and interesting, is now cut up (and rendered unintelligible if it were worth listening to) into _pezzi concertati_, or long singing conversations, which present a tedious succession of unconnected, ever-changing _motivos_, having nothing to do with each other; and if a satisfactory air is for a moment introduced, which the ear would like to dwell upon, to hear modulated, varied, and again returned to, it is broken off, before it is well understood, by a sudden transition into a totally different melody, time, and key, and recurs no more, so that no impression can be made or recollection of it preserved. Single songs are almost exploded ... even the prima donna, who would formerly have complained at having less than three or four airs allotted to her, is now satisfied with one trifling _cavatina_ for a whole opera."