be the precursor of a totally new style, full of beauty and sentiment. This was followed by the nobly conceived and carefully executed La vestale (1807), which not only swept all popular hostility before it, but won the special prize offered by Napoleon and adjudicated by Méhul, Gossec and Grétry. This in turn was followed by Fernand Cortez (1809, remodeled 1817 and 1823), which belongs to the same grand class. The excellence of these was largely the fruit of the dramatic genius of the librettist Étienne de Jouy (d. 1846) who not only supplied fine texts, but influenced the composer in forming his new style. In 1809 Spontini married the daughter of J. B. Érard (brother of the famous piano-maker). In 1810-2 he was conductor of the Théâtre Italien, where he instituted great improvements in the repertory and representations, including the first performance at Paris of Mozart's Don Giovanni in its original form, and organized series of concerts at which Haydn's symphonies and other German music were given. From 1814 he was court-composer to Louis XVIII. and wrote several 'occasional' stage-pieces for the new régime and, after prolonged labor, the opera Olympie (1819), which he regarded as his masterpiece, though its value was only slowly admitted by the public and chiefly in Germany.
In 1820, as the fruit of negotiations that began in 1814, he was made director of opera to the king of Prussia, with a large salary, extraordinary facilities and ample liberty. The Berlin opera had become the best in Germany, owing to the exertions of Count Brühl, who had been supervisor since 1815. Spontini and Brühl were awkwardly conjoined in the management, and Spontini's idiosyncrasies involved complications. Still, he scored a phenomenal success by the renderings of his three great operas, which he prepared with unheard-of deliberation and pains. But at this juncture Weber's Der Freischütz was first given, and immediately public favor began to veer away from Spontini. He struggled to compete with Nurmahal (1822) and Alcidor (1825), but the librettos were poor and fanciful subjects were unsuited to his mind. He rose once more to his grand style in Agnes van Hohenstaufen (1829), and for years kept at work upon sundry extensive projects, never completed. In 1840 came a change of monarchs. His enemies entrapped him into a show of disloyalty for which he was legally convicted, but in 1841 he received a technically honorable dismissal. He never recovered from his disappointment and disgrace, and, except on rare occasions, spent his last years in obscurity.
His character was suspicious, despotic and finical. His technical equipment, especially in harmony, was defective. His genius lacked variety and lightness of touch. Yet he was a most patient worker, a follower of ideals, and a born dramatist. The stern vigor of his personality came out in his terrific discipline at rehearsals, in the prodigious intensity of the effects he sought and in the serious elevation of his best works. His career was tragic, but not without useful consequences.
The instinct for practical success in sustained effort which
Spontini lacked was conspicuous in his versatile and ambitious
contemporary Meyerbeer, whose life and work belonged both
