Page:Pratt - The history of music (1907).djvu/452

 of his mind, his keenness in measuring the popular appetite and his energy in keeping that appetite supplied with novel sensations. But he was more than versatile. While not failing to maintain the conditions of telling vocal effort through cantabile melodies, with their capacity for emotional impression, through sparkling coruscations of ornament and through all kinds of concerted numbers, he had early become engaged through the study of German composers upon the problems of instrumentation, and he saw the need in Italian methods of radical improvement on this side. He gradually deserted the bare recitative for a style of accompanied declamation more consistent with a sustained musical work. He gave great attention to the whole factor of accompaniments. He enriched his scores with novel effects in rhythm, harmony and tone-color, and sought to weld together successive items into irresistible cumulations of effect. With all his instinct for popular éclat and his love of glittering externals, he was much more than a clever trickster. He had positive technical genius. He represented the Italian spirit of his day at its acme of enterprise. Yet, with the exception of one or two of his best works, he wrought without a profound sense of the nature of the musical drama. His standard was fixed by an ambition for immediate success with popular audiences as he found them rather than by any inspired convictions. Technique to him was of greater moment than either structure or imagination. He was unprincipled in his plagiarisms from other composers and from his own works, and he often wrote with reckless and impudent haste. The narrowness of his ambition is shown by his poverty of accomplishment except in opera. The essential lack of elevation in his artistic influence made the movement of which he was the head a positive obstacle in the way of progress long after he had ceased to produce.

Gioachino Rossini (d. 1868) was born in 1792 at Pesaro, his father being a petty civil official. When he was only 4 years old, his father was arrested for republican sympathies and his mother became a singer in comic opera, the boy being left to be brought up by a butcher in Bologna. His slender education included music-lessons, and at 10 his talent had already made him worth something as singer, horn-player and accompanist. At 13 he found good friends in the tenor Babbini and the civil engineer Giusti, who much advanced his general culture. At 15 he entered the conservatory, having lessons in counterpoint under Mattei. He had no patience with strict composition, but pro