Now, I assert that Arrigo Boïto helped all this, stimulated a young-old man to conquer new and more fruitful provinces. And Boïto, who built two of the best librettos we know, certainly influenced Verdi in his study of instrumentation. Compare Rigoletto and Otello orchestrally! The advance is remarkable, all things being considered. And at Verdi’s years! I suspect that Verdi made the sketches, which Boïto transformed into painted pictures; just as I discern, as can any one with ears, the intellectual characteristics in common between Mefistofele and Iago’s monologues. Yet Verdi is true Verdi to the last. Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, and La Traviata have one cardinal merit, in addition to their miracles of mellifluousness—they prefigure the later Verdi, the thinking Verdi, the truer musical dramatist. In regarding these we again encounter critical superciliousness of the most pronounced type. The neo-Verdians will have none of the middle-century Verdi—forgetting that no man may lift himself to the stars by his own bootstraps. Verdi offers a fine picture of crawling, creeping evolution. I confess that I believe the man would have stuck at Don Carlos, Sicilian Vespers, Araldo, Un Ballo in Maschera, La Forza del Destino, Simon Boccanegra, and the rest of the reactionary stuff, had it not been for the masterful influence of Boïto, himself a composer. Boïto helped Verdi to scramble upon the shoulders of Verdi, compelled the Verdi of 1887 to forget the Verdi of 1871. Aïda is pointed out as the great turn in the style of the composer. It is fuller of Meyerbeerisms than any opera composed since L’Africaine, as full as is Rienzi. Indeed, I doubt if Aïda would have been born had not L’Africaine preceded it. The resemblance to Meyerbeer does not stop at the libretto; there is the same flamboyancy in color, the same barbaric taste for full-blown harmony and exotic tunes—not to mention the similarities in the stories. Wagner had far less to do with Aïda than Meyerbeer, though many believe the contrary. To Rigoletto, in 1851, must we go in the search for the roots of the mature Verdi. In the declamatory monologues of the hunchback jester are the germs of the more intellectual and subtle monologues of Iago and of Falstaff. Il Trovatore contains strong dramatic situations, and if the tower scene is become hackneyed, yet how well devised! In this much-admired, much-sung composition are to be found harmonic straws which indicate to the keen observer the way the musical wind was bound to blow nearly a half-century later. With Traviata Verdi made his first attempt at musical psychologizing. Banal as is the book, there is no denying the power of some of its situations. No, decidedly it will not do to overlook the Verdi of 1850. It would be building musical history without straw.