head in his symphonic poems. The French Saint-Saëns followed him, rather
than his countryman Berlioz; so did Tschaikowsky, Dvorák, and most
modern composers, up to Richard Strauss, whose symphonic poems are the
most widely discussed, praised, and abused compositions of our time.

To the great names contained in the preceding paragraphs another must
be added,--that of an Italian. By an odd coincidence, Verdi was born in
the same year as Wagner, 1813. But what is far more remarkable is that
at the close of their careers, so different otherwise, these two great
composers met again--in their music, Verdi as a Wagnerian convert. Up to
his fifty-eighth year Verdi had written two dozen operas, all made up of
strings of arias in the old-fashioned way,--superb arias, many of them,
especially in "Il Trovatore" and "Aïda," but still arias. Then he rested
from his labors sixteen years; and when he appeared on the stage again,
with his "Otello" and "Falstaff," he had adopted Wagner's maxims that
arias are out of place in a music-drama; that "the play's the thing,"
and that the music should follow the text word for word.

Surely, this was the most remarkable of Wagner's triumphs and conquests.
He who had been denounced for decades as being unable to write properly
for the voice was actually taken up as a model by the greatest composer
of Italy, the land of song. Moreover, all the young composers of Italy
have turned their backs on the traditions of Italian opera. The chief
ambition of Mascagni, Leoncavallo, Puccini, and all the others has been
to be called "the Italian Wagner;" and their operas are much more like
Wagner's than like Rossini's and Donizetti's, being free from arias and
the vocal embroideries that formerly were the essence of Italian opera.
The same is true of the operas written in recent decades in France,
Germany, and other countries. Massenet, Saint-Saëns, Humperdinck,
Goldmark, Richard Strauss, Paderewski, and all the others have followed