With the birth of Italian opera, in 1600, a new art of singing also came into existence. The two arts, opera and singing, developed side by side, each dependent on the other. And most important to the present inquiry, the art or science of training voices also came into being. In _Le Revoluzioni del Teatro Musicale Italiano_ (Venice, 1785), Arteaga says of the development of opera: "But nothing contributed so much to clarify Italian music at that time as the excellence and the abundance of the singers." A race of singing masters seems almost to have sprung up in Italy. These illustrious masters taught the singers to produce effects with their voices such as had never been heard of before. From 1600 to 1750 the progress of the art of singing was uninterrupted. Each great teacher carried the art a little further, discovering new beauties and powers in the voice, and finding means to impart his new knowledge to his pupils. This race of teachers is known to-day as the Old Italian School, and their system of instruction is called the Old Italian Method. Just what this method consisted of is a much-discussed question. Whatever its system of instruction, the old Italian school seems to have suffered a gradual decline. In 1800 it was distinctly on the wane; it was entirely superseded, during the years from 1840 to 1865, by the modern scientific methods. Considered as a practical system of Voice Culture, the old Italian method is a highly mysterious subject. Little is now known about the means used for training students of singing in the correct use of the voice. This much is fairly certain: the old masters paid little or no attention to what are now considered scientific principles. They taught in what modern vocal theorists consider a rather haphazard fashion. The term "empirical" is often applied to their method, and to the knowledge of the voice on which it was based.[1] But as to what the old masters actually knew about the voice, and just how they taught their pupils to sing, on these points the modern world is in almost complete ignorance. Many attempts have been made in recent years to reconstruct the old Italian method in the light of modern scientific knowledge of the voice. But no such analysis of the empirical system has ever been convincing. [Note 1: "The old Italian method of instruction, to which vocal music owed its high condition, was purely empirical." (Emma Seiler, _The Voice in Singing_. Phila., 1886.)]