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Throughout the centuries, composers have endeavored to capture human emotions in their work. Nowhere is this struggle more evident than in the works of operatic composers, who tailor their music to forcefully convey the poetry for which they write. An invaluable tool to these composers is harmonic language, helping to express desires and forces of good and evil underneath the plain and simple language of the text. Harmonic language encompasses several aspects of music, including the major or minor keys in which a piece is written, the piece's tonality, or even atonality, what kinds of resolutions and transitions are used to link or conclude ideas, and the homophonic or polyphonic texture of orchestral voices. Though their ideas often conflicted theoretically, composers of 19th Century opera were fully aware of the character and emotional implications of the harmonic language they used. Evidence of their deliberateness can be found in the revisions of their work- comparing an old......

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