This brought about an entire change of method, the dramatic and far-seeing composer Gluck remodelling opera entirely, and endeavouring to bring it, with the added resources made possible by the improvements in musical technique, into line with the consistent ideas of the Florentine amateurs, who endeavoured to reproduce opera on the model of the ancient Greeks. [Sidenote: =Gluck’s Followers=] Gluck’s reforms had a very wide influence upon the history of opera, which will be more fully dwelt upon in another place; an influence that may be traced in the magnificent efforts of the group of German masters that followed in the general lines laid down by him in their adherence to dramatic truth and fitness. Moreover, these composers, the greatest that the world has ever known, were developing the resources of music of all kinds, and their achievements in the field of composition generally were reflected in their writings for the stage. Consequently, we find in the operas of Mozart, Beethoven, Weber, and Schubert an advance in musical technique corresponding with the rapid strides which the art of music as a whole was then making. [Sidenote: =Varying Subjects Treated=] And again, their varied and diverse temperaments led them into widely different directions in their search for libretti, a point in which they were followed by Spohr, Marschner, Cherubini, Spontini, and others. The whole range of the field of opera was widening out, and the subjects selected for treatment were no longer solely classical or cast into classic mould, but included the romantic, the chivalrous, the supernatural, the plebeian, and other types of plot and character; these wide differences were of course reflected in the music. Another point to be noticed about this period of opera is that the orchestra employed began to settle down into definite shape, the constituent instruments being those which form what we now call the classical orchestra. These instruments are such as are to be found (with one or two exceptions) in the orchestra of to-day, and such operas therefore admit of reproduction at the present time, because, although other instruments have been added to those which form the ordinary classical orchestra, no radical changes in methods of scoring have taken place since the time of Mozart, Beethoven, and Weber. [Sidenote: =Italian Opera=] Opera had now become so many-sided an art form that it will be impossible in this brief _resumé_ of its history to follow it through all its varieties; the principal of these were the “Opera Comique” of the French, the Ballad Opera of the English, and the melodic and tuneful form of Italian opera, which claims Rossini as its shining light, and which, by its other sons, Donizetti and Bellini, attracted and riveted public attention in Europe for so long. [Sidenote: =Abuses by the Singers=]