 All of his significant music is for the voice ( opera and songs ) and this reflects his detailed <unk> in Italian opera . Throughout his career he wrote his operas with specific singers in mind and took great care to temper his writing to their strengths ; but at the same time he seemed little interested in expressing the emotions of his characters , preferring to use his music to underline the larger @-@ scale machinations of the plot . In this way he was close to the ideas of his teacher Vogler , himself renowned for his dramatic depictions of nature and incident in keyboard music , who wrote in 1779 that " writing beautifully is easy ; expression is not too difficult ; but only the genius of a great painter ... can choose for each picture <unk> and natural colours that are particular to it . " Indeed , his devotion to the voice often led him to ignore the dramatic cohesion of his operas ; typically , he would write far too much music and the scores of his operas would have to be drastically cut during rehearsals . ( The lengthy overture to Le prophète had to be cut in its entirety , surviving only in a piano arrangement by Charles @-@ Valentin Alkan ) . 
