MODERN ITALY 262
VERDI--BOITO--PONCHIELLI--PUCCINI--MASCAGNI--LEONCAVALLO--GIORDANO
XIII. MODERN GERMAN AND SLAVONIC OPERA 302
CORNELIUS--GOETZ---GOLDMARK--HUMPERDINCK--STRAUSS--SMETANA--
GLINKA--PADEREWSKI
XIV. ENGLISH OPERA 323
BALFE--WALLACE--BENEDICT--GORING THOMAS--MACKENZIE--STANFORD--
SULLIVAN--SMYTH
INDEX OF OPERAS 351
INDEX OF COMPOSERS 361
INTRODUCTION
If Music be, among the arts, 'Heaven's youngest-teemed star', the
latest of the art-forms she herself has brought forth is
unquestionably Opera. Three hundred years does not at first seem a
very short time, but it is not long when it covers the whole period of
the inception, development, and what certainly looks like the
decadence, of an important branch of man's artistic industry. The art
of painting has taken at least twice as long to develop; yet the three
centuries from Monteverde to Debussy cover as great a distance as that
which separates Cimabue from Degas. In operatic history, revolutions,
which in other arts have not been accomplished in several generations,
have got themselves completed, and indeed almost forgotten, in the
course of a few years. Twenty-five years ago, for example, Wagner's
maturer works were regarded, by the more charitable of those who did
not admire them, as intelligible only to the few enthusiasts who had
devoted years of study to the unravelling of their mysteries; the
world in general looked askance at the 'Wagnerians', as they were
called, and professed to consider the shyly-confessed admiration of
the amateurs as a mere affectation.
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