Rameau is the next composer to be mentioned. His fame is not so great as that of his predecessor Lully, nor are his works so full of vivacity and brightness. But he was a capable and skilled workman, and did much for French opera; his music is pompous and antique, nor does it compare in interest with that of the versatile Jean Jacques Rousseau, who wrote at least one work, _Le Devin du Village_, which enjoyed very many years of popularity. [Sidenote: =Divergence of Methods=] The last-named work, moreover, did not pretend to belong to the genus “Grand Opera,” but was an “Opera Comique,” a branch of art in which the French have always excelled: indeed, from about this date (1760 _circa_) opera in France was diverging into two lines, one looking towards Grand Opera, and taking exalted, serious, or tragic themes for treatment, the other having the production of Comic Opera, with all its variety of scope and more human subjects of interest, as its aim; the course of these two must be followed, as indeed they ran to a great extent, side by side. Much was due to the opening, in 1762, of the new “Opera Comique” Theatre in Paris, at which composers obtained a hearing, whose music was not fit for the Opera House proper, and who would not, moreover, have attempted work in the larger and more serious forms. [Illustration: PUCCINI.] [Illustration: PICCINI.] [Sidenote: =The Successors of Gluck and Piccini=] Such men were Monsigny (1729-1817), Grétry (1741-1813), and Philidor (1726-1797). They were at work in Paris shortly after the Gluck-Piccini contest, and wrote operas which pleased by their simplicity, brightness, and tunefulness; all of them being of the order of the German “Singspiel”—_i.e._, with spoken dialogue. But it must be remembered that these composers, although they flourished subsequent to Gluck, had not imbibed his principles; nor did the light forms of opera which they, in the main, set themselves to write, leave much room for the exemplification of such. Consequently, when the operas of Mozart, constructed with artistic unity of principle and upon logical lines, began to obtain a hearing in Paris, such works as theirs soon dropped out of fashion. [Sidenote: =Méhul, 1763-1817=] Of more importance is Méhul, who, while still writing in the main for the Opera Comique, did so in a thoroughly artistic manner, taking Gluck as his model. He was a man of considerable originality, who made the curious experiment of leaving out the violins of the orchestra throughout the whole of his opera _Uthal_, with the idea of giving a cold, vague effect. However successful in that respect, it may be safely prophesied that this was done by Méhul for the first and the last time. His most popular work was _Joseph_, a story dealing with the Bible narrative. One of its tunes is well known to pianists through the fact that Weber wrote a set of very interesting pianoforte variations upon it. [Sidenote: =Cherubini and Spontini=]