It is not easy to characterize simply and clearly the nature of the musical development which took place during the eighteenth century. The blossoming of music was so manifold, so diversified, so irrepressible in every direction, that there was not one single province of it, wherein new and masterly creations were not brought out. The central figures of this period were those of the two Colossi, Bach and Haendel; after them Haydn, the master of genial proportion and taste; Mozart, the melodist of ineffable sweetness, and finally at the end of the century, the great master, Beethoven. In opera we have the entire work of that great reformer, the Chevalier Gluck, and a succession of Italian composers who enlarged the boundaries of the Italian music-drama in every direction, but especially in the direction of the impassioned and sensational. Add to these influences, already sufficiently diversified, that of a succession of brilliant virtuosi upon the leading instruments, whereby the resources of all the effective musical apparatuses were more fully explored and illustrated, with the final result of affording the poetic composer additional means of bringing his ideas to a more effective expression--and we have the general features of a period in music so luxuriant that in it we might easily lose ourselves; nor can we easily form a clear idea of the entire movement as the expression of a single underlying spiritual impulse. Yet such in its inner apprehension it most assuredly was.