WHAT, in the waking world, as contrasted with the nightmare fantasies of Notarnicola, is the position of Mercadante in the Italian musical hierarchy, what are his operas like, and what influence, if any, had he upon Verdi ? Between 1819 and I866 he produced sixty operas. In facility he rivalled Rossini and Donizetti, and five times in his career saw four new works put on the stage in the course of a single year. He had his failures, but also triumphant successes, and his reputation was not confined to Italy. In I824 he wrote three operas for Vienna; 1827-29 he passed in Spain and Portugal, producing new works at Madrid, Lisbon and Cadiz. Twenty-two of his operas were published complete in vocal score, as well as fragments of many others, ranging from a single aria to a volume of all the principal numbers ( pezzi reuniti ). The early works reveal him as a gifted follower of Rossini, extremely fluent and competent, but lacking a recognizable individual note of his own. Then in 1836 he was called to Paris to produce ' I Briganti', which was a failure, but during his stay there he witnessed the first performance of' I,es Huguenots', and acquaintance with Meyerbeer's music probably suggested changes of style observable in his next few operas, ' II Giuramento ' (1837), 'Le due illustri rivali' (1838), 'Elena da Feltre' (1838), ' II Bravo' (1839) and 'La Vestale ' (1840). Meyerbeer's direct influence on Mercadante's musical style, however, is much less apparent than it was to become later in certain of Verdi's operas. It would be interesting to know how far the works of Spontini, with whom he has something in common, were known to Mercadante. None of them seem to have been performed during his stay in Paris and they were not often reproduced in Italy at this period. During the composition of 'Elena da Feltre' Mercadante outlined a remarkable programme of operatic reform in a letter to Florimo: