Before this stagnation of baroque opera there was a provincial outburst of life in the wonderful patchwork of Purcell's art (1658-95). In the early Dido and Aeneas he and the humble Nahum Tate (of Tate and Brady) produced, perhaps, the most perfect opera before Gluck. Dryden was less accommodating. He had been so disgusted by the stupid vanity of the fashionable Monsieur Grabu that when he wrote King Arthur he insisted on arranging that the musical characters should be quite independ ent of the main action, and with the infliction of this condition upon Purcell, English opera was relegated to a permanent musical squalor which even endured to ruin Weber's last work, Oberon, in 1826.
The forms of music known before 175o were architectural or decorative, but essentially non-dramatic. Baroque opera required something more than reform, and the opportunity for progress came with the rise of the sonata style. The music of Gluck's time was too firmly organized to be upset by new discoveries; in fact the chief need for opera was retrenchment in rhetorical forms. Gluck, as Handel had remarked of his early works, was no contra puntist, and to the end of his life this hampered him in "jining his flats." But he had a genius for phrasing (see RHYTHM), which went far to promote dramatic movement, and another aspect of this was a sense of symphonic form as vigorous as could find scope in opera at all ; while his melodic power was of the kind which Matthew Arnold calls "touchstones of poetry." The lasting effect of his work on French music left the course of Italian opera seria unchecked. Mozart's Idomeneo is the grave of some of his greatest music, including many genuinely dramatic strokes, and his perfunctory Clemenza di Tito is the last opera seria that contains any music worth extracting. The unmistakable influence of Gluck could not save Idomeneo; and Mozart's tri umphs belong to the comedy of manners, until he entered the transcendental world of Die Zauberflote. His first impulse was inveterately musical, and his power of dramatic movement and characterization grew steadily without always preventing him from yielding to singers and indulging himself in dramatically vicious musical luxuries. But after his first exuberant German opera, Die Entfiihrung aus dem Serail, it is not so easy as it seems to catch Mozart napping. He is a dangerously subtle paro
dist, and in Cosi fan tutte the heroic coloratura arias of the virtuous Fiordiligi and Dorabella are the arias of ladies who do protest too much; and in Die Zauberfiiite the vocal fire works of the Queen of Night are the rhetoric of a formidable person who, we are told, "hopes to cajole the people with illusions." Mozart.—The article MOZART contains further remarks on his operas. They are organized so thoroughly on the basis of their libretti that it is a serious mistake, not made by scholars like Jahn, to underrate the wits of his literary collaborator, Da Ponte. Goethe did not even underrate the rapscallion Schikaneder, but took the symbolical aspects of Die Zauberflote so seriously as to sketch a sequel to it. Since boyhood Mozart never wrote an opera without thoroughly controlling its dramatic movement. Where he relaxes the relaxation is complete. The movement in Die Entfiihrung is intermittent and the static elements excessively favoured, but the movement exists and is powerful. In Figaro, the fourth act, with its tangle of assignations in the garden, has five arias in succession which would make a mere concert on the stage if they were all performed ; but there is an ironic dramatic tension behind the last of them (Deh vieni, non tardar) ; and when the librettist provides action Wagner is not as quick as Mozart in his timing of the details and the whole. One of Wagner's Eng lish propagandists, Hueffer, cited the duet in which Cherubino and Susanna are trying to find a way out of the locked room before the Count returns, and accused Mozart of keeping the Count waiting at the door until this effective piece of music had run its formal course. But every stage manager finds that Mozart has barely given Cherubino time for a natural hesitation before jumping out of the window, in spite of Susanna's terrified protest.