396 The Evolution of Music. 



of worthy dramatic subjects, which with him were wholly 

 classical, and he attempted to do this by dispensing with all 

 meretricious embellishments. The valuable results of his 

 work were largely obscured by Eossini and his successors, 

 Donizetti, Bellini, Mercadante, and others, who aimed at 

 florid vocalization, and overwhelmed, for a considerable pe- 

 riod, the true aims of the operatic drama, though these were 

 nobly sustained by the operas of Weber and in Beethoven's 

 Fidelio. Against this flimsy school Wagner raised the stand- 

 ard of revolt. Upon the epics of German mythology, and 

 by uniting, as accessories, all the arts to aid in representa- 

 tion, and by eschewing completely the trivialities of the Ital- 

 ian school, he has enriched the musical drama with creations 

 of extraordinary range and beauty. Whether, indeed, Wag- 

 ner's peculiar theory of continuous dramatic recitation, and 

 the doing away with all sustained and fully developed me- 

 lodic and choral forms, as illustrated in his later works, will 

 command the assent of the future of musical art, is a ques- 

 tion which sharply divides present opinion, and which it is 

 not pertinent here to discuss. 



THIRD PERIOD. 

 The Melodic- Polyphonic School 



Bach and Handel open the third period in the history of 

 the evolution of music. Bearing in mind our law of dif- 

 ferentiation, of development by specialization first of the 

 arts from each other, giving to each an independent life 

 and history, and then the specializations in each art we 

 have seen that in Greece music was subservient to recita- 

 tion and the choral dances, and its form was melodic and 

 not harmonic, so far as we can judge. Such was its history 

 until the eleventh or twelfth century, when harmony grew 

 up under the inspiration of the free harmonic forms of the 

 people's songs ; counterpoint and fugue succeeded. The re- 

 ligious and dramatic oratorio and the varied forms of opera 

 materially enlarged the possibilities of music. At the be- 

 ginning of the eighteenth century these forms were fully 

 developed, and upon the labors of all previous composers 

 who had wrought in these various forms the great compos- 

 ers of that century entered. Our third period shows the 

 application of these forms, under the genius of masters in 

 the art, to the highest artistic and emotional expression and 



