father had persuaded the tenor to accompany his son abroad and had succeeded in getting him two years leave of absence from the Imperial Chapel. The opera season 1830-1831 was unusually brilliant at Milan, and the two friends heard Grisi, Pasta, Rubini, Galli and Orlandi. Their greatest experience came at the end of the season, when Bellini's "La Sonnambula" was mounted for the first time, "Pasta and Rubini singing their very best in order to uphold their favourite _maestro_." "We, in our box," continues Glinka, "shed torrents of tears--tears of emotion and enthusiasm." But still more important to his appreciation of vocal music was his acquaintance in Naples with Nozzari and Fodor-Mainville. Ivanov studied with both masters, and Glinka was permitted to be present at his lessons. Nozzari had already retired from the stage, but his voice was still in its fullest beauty. His compass was two octaves, from B to B, and his scale so perfect that Glinka says it could only be compared to Field's scale upon the piano. Under the influence of Italian music, he wrote at this time a few piano pieces and two songs to Russian words. His setting of Koslov's "Venetian Night" was merely an echo of his surroundings; "The Victor," music to Joukovsky's words, showed more promise of originality, and here we find for the first time the use of the plagal cadence which he employed so effectively in _A Life for the Tsar_. During the third year of his visit, he felt a conviction that he was moving on the wrong track, and that there was a certain insincerity in all that he was attempting. "It cost me some pains to counterfeit the Italian _sentimento brilliante_," he says. "I, a dweller in the North, felt quite differently (from the children of the sunny South); with us, things either make no impression at all, or they sink deep into the soul; it is either a frenzy of joy or bitter tears." These reflections, joined to an acute fit of homesickness, led to his decision to return to Russia. After a few pleasant days spent in Vienna, he travelled direct to Berlin, where he hoped to make up some of the deficiencies of his Italian visit with the assistance of the well-known theorist Siegfried Dehn. Dehn saw at once that his pupil was gifted with genius, but impatient of drudgery. He gave himself the trouble to devise a short cut to the essentials of musical theory. In five months he succeeded in giving Glinka a bird's-eye view of harmony and counterpoint, fugue and instrumentation; the whole course being concentrated into four small exercise books. "There is no doubt," writes Glinka, "that I owe more to Dehn than to any of my masters. He not only put my musical knowledge into order but also my ideas on art in general, and after his lessons I no longer groped my way along, but worked with the full consciousness of what I was doing."