proper regard for melodic beauty prescribes. In the power and propriety
of musical declamation his operas are conceded to be without a
superior. His overtures hold their place in classical music as ranking
with the best ever written, and show a richness of resource and
knowledge of form in treating the orchestra which his his contemporaries
admitted were only equaled by Beethoven.

Cherubini's place in ecclesiastical music is that by which he is best
known to the musical public of to-day; for his operas, owing to the
immense demands they make on the dramatic and vocal resources of the
artist, are but rarely presented in France, Germany, and England, and
never in America. They are only given where music is loved on account
of its noble traditions, and not for the mere sake of idle and luxurious
amusement. As a composer of masses, however, Cherubini's genius is
familiar to all who frequent the services of the Roman Church. His
relation to the music of Catholicism accords with that of Sebastian Bach
to the music of Protestantism. Haydn, Mozart, and even Beethoven,
are held by the best critics to be his inferiors in this form of
composition. His richness of melody, sense of dramatic color, and
great command of orchestral effects, gave him commanding power in the
interpretation of religious sentiments; while an ardent faith inspired
with passion, sweetness, and devotion what Place styles his "sublime
visions." Miel, one of his most competent critics, writes of him in this
eloquent strain: "If he represents the passion and death of Christ, the
heart feels itself wounded with the most sublime emotion; and when
he recounts the 'Last Judgment' the blood freezes with dread at the
redoubled and menacing calls of the exterminating angel. All those
admirable pictures that the Raphaels and Michael Angelos have painted
with colors and the brush, Cherubini brings forth with the voice and
orchestra." In brief, if Cherubini is the founder of a later school