Bellini, with "Norma" and "Sonnambula," and Donizetti, with "Lucia di Lammermoor" and "Lucretia Borgia," still hold a place on the operatic stage, but their grasp is weakening. Verdi was the best equipped of all Italian opera composers, and his "Trovatore," with it rare gems, will crown his memory to the end of musical time. His later works, "Aida," "Othello," and "Falstaff," written under the influence of the Wagner period, are quite different from his earlier operas in instrumentation and in treatment of themes. In them he is more logical and stronger, but less sensuous. They furnish the first instances of Italian music dressed in foreign garb; of Italian music written under pressure from without. It has until recently been Italy's province to shed influence over the musical world. I construe Verdi's concessions to Wagner as the strongest possible endorsement of the latter's ideas. No other composer was in position to pay such tribute to Wagner's forceful and far-reaching art sense.
The Italian composers of the new school are musical brigands, who for a brief space succeeded in taking tribute from the musical world. Their leader, Mascagni, made such a sensational raid with his "Cavalleria Rusticana" that young Italy jumped into the breach he made, and evidently thought to take possession of our temple, regardless of their lack of equipment and discipline. Although but few years have elapsed since this assault on art, its episodes have already been relegated to the realm of disturbing memories.
"Cavalleria Rusticana," the first and best of its class, has some merits; it is short, melodious, and dramatic, but its melodies are often sentimental, and its dramatic points are usually made through the audacious employment of crude means. The direct influence of this work and its reception, conspired for harm to art.
Gluck was a Teuton, and although educated in Italy and adopted by France, can with propriety be called the father of German opera. His "Iphigenia in Tauris" and "Orpheus and Eurydice" will always be regarded as classic models of lyric writing. Gluck's schemes differed little from those of the Italian school, but his harmonic and instrumental methods were German.