Verdi, also lacking an artistic conscience, and without high artistic ideals, produced operas as indefatigably as incubators chickens. Naturally such music perished early, and his failures more than balance his successes. He made money, an enormous amount; he was probably the richest composer that ever drove a pen. The usual fate has overtaken the early music, while even Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, and La Traviata no longer draw unless sung by an “all star” cast. I pass over the Manzoni Requiem of 1874. It was too near the Aïda epoch to make a great forward step. Otello, in 1887, set the musical world mad with surprise, curiosity, delight. It reveals little or none of the narrow, noisy, vulgar, and violent Verdi of 1850. The character-drawing is done by a man who is master of his material. The plot moves in majestical splendor, and the musical psychology is often subtle. At last Verdi has flowered. His other music, smelling ranker of the soil, showing more thematic invention, was but the effort of a hot-headed man of the footlights, a seeker after applause and money. In Otello all musical provincialisms have vanished; the writing is clear, the passion more controlled, the effects aimed at easily compassed. The master craft of Iago is set over against the fiery, nerve-shaking passion of Otello, and Shakespeare is suggested, withal a very Italian one. Falstaff was a second surprise. How an old graybeard of eighty could have conceived such music is only to be explained by the young heart of the man, by his sweetly healthy nature, his Latin frugality in living. He was ever a taciturn man, a stoic, not an epicurean. As an index to his character his music is often misleading. Add to these qualities the beautiful friendship of Arrigo Boïto, from which came a libretto, and the sum total is a setting of Shakespeare’s comedy such as the world has never seen. Here again Wagner had less to do with the matter than is supposed. In the musical dialogue Verdi patterned after Die Meistersinger, for the emotion ever follows the text. From Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and Rossini’s Barber of Seville he absorbed no little of gay sunshine and effervescence. But his form is his own; it grew out of the situations of the play, and was not a procrustean bed of theory upon which the composer stretched his characters. It is laughing and joyous, this comedy of an octogenarian. It fairly ripples with the humor of the Fat Knight. There are no leading motives in the Wagnerian sense, though every character is outlined with precision.