Professor Langhans notes, in his history of music, that in the Middle
Ages, as late as Luther's time, it took two men to compose the
simplest piece of music: one who conceived the melody, and the other
who added the harmonic accompaniment. The theoretical writer,
Glareanus, deliberately expressed his opinion, in 1547, that it might
be _possible_ to unite these two functions in one person, but that one
would rarely find the inventor of a melody able to work it out
artistically. We have made much progress in music within these three
hundred years, and to-day every composer is not only expected to
invent his own harmonies and accompaniments to his melodies, but,
since Wagner set the example, composers are beginning to consider it
incumbent on them to write their own librettos; and, what is more
remarkable, if we examine biographies of musicians carefully we find
that, even _before_ Wagner, not a few composers assisted in the
preparation of their operatic texts; and this remark applies even to
some of the Italian composers, who were proverbially careless
regarding their librettos. Rossini was, perhaps, too indolent to
devote much attention to his texts, and he was apt to postpone even
the _musical_ work to the last moment, so that he sometimes had to be
locked up in his room by his friends, to enable him to finish his
score by the date named in his contract. Yet it is worthy of note that
during the composition of what Rossini's admirers commonly regard as
his best and most characteristic work--the "Barber of Seville"--he
lived in the same house with his librettist. "The admirable unity of
the 'Barber,' in which a person without previous information on the
subject could scarcely say whether the words were written for the
music or the music for the words, may doubtless," as Mr. Sutherland
Edwards suggests, "in a great measure be accounted for by the fact
that poet and musician were always together during the composition of