Various important events have occurred since the publication of these volumes in America: _inter alia_, the performance of Wagner's last great work "Parsifal," and the death of the great German musician; the production of new works by Gounod and Verdi; and so forth. The editor has endeavoured, as briefly as practicable, to supplement Mr. Ferris's _causeries_ with the addenda necessary to bring _Great Composers_ down to date. Mr. Ferris further acknowledges his obligation to the following authorities for the facts embodied in these sketches:--Hullah's _History of Modern Music_; Fétis' _Biographie Universelle des Musiciens_; Clementi's _Biographie des Musiciens_; Hogarth's _History of the Opera_; Sutherland Edwards' _History of the Opera_; Schlüter's _History of Music_; Chorley's _Thirty Years' Musical Reminiscences_; Stendhall's _Vie de Rossini_; Bellasy's _Memorials of Cherubini_; Grove's _Musical Dictionary_; Crowestl's _Musical Anecdotes_; Schoelcher's _Life of Handel_; Liszt's _Life of Chopin_; Elsie Polko's _Reminiscences_; Lampadius' _Life of Mendelssohn_; Urbino's _Musical Composers_; Franz Hueffer's _Wagner and the Music of the Future_; Haweis' _Music and Morals_; and the various articles in the leading cyclopædias. To this volume the present editor has appended a chronological table of the musicians referred to in the following sketches. In reading the lives of these great musical composers, we can trace the gradual development of music from its earliest days as an art and as a science. Unlike the other arts which have flourished, decayed, and had rebirth, music, as we now understand it, sprang into being out of the ferment of the Renaissance, and therefore is the youngest of the arts--a modern growth belonging particularly to the later phases of civilisation. Music in a rude, undeveloped condition has existed doubtless "since the world began." In all nations, and in the records of past civilisations, indications of music are to be found; martial strains for the encouragement of warriors on the march; sacred hymns and sacrificial chants in religious ceremonials; and song accompanied by some rude instrument--we find to have been known and practised among remote tribes as well as among potent races. The bards of divers peoples and many countries in ancient days played upon the harp not merely for delight, but for the exorcism of evil spirits, the dispersion of melancholy, the soothing and cure of mental and physical disorders. Here we find music as the direct expression of feeling, but not as a science. The Greeks made further use of music by incorporating it into their dramas, but it was chiefly declamatory, and was used solely in the choruses. To modern ears such music would sound very inefficient, more especially as the antique instruments were of the crudest--and although musical sounds, to a limited extent, could be produced from them, all attempts at _expression_ must have been unsuccessful.