Fifteen years before the French Revolution, of which, in the present day, every one can trace the gradual approach, the important question that occupied the capital of France was not the emancipation of the peasants, nor the reorganisation of the judicial system, nor the equalisation of the taxes all over the country; it was simply the merit of Gluck as compared with Piccinni, and of Piccinni as compared with Gluck. Paris was divided into two camps, each of which had its own special music. The German master was declared by the partisans of the Italian to be severe, unmelodious and heavy: by his own friends he was considered profound, full of inspiration and eminently dramatic. Piccinni, on the other hand, was accused by his enemies of frivolity and insipidity, while his supporters maintained that his melodies touched the heart, and that it was not the province of music to appeal to the intellect. Fundamentally, the dispute was that which still exists as to the superiority of German or Italian music. Severe classicists continue to despise modern Italian composers as unintellectual, and the Italians still sneer at the music of Germany as the "music of mathematics." Rossini, Donizetti, and Verdi have been undervalued in succession by the critics of Germany, France and England; and although there can be no question as to the inferiority of the last to the first-named of these composers, Signor Verdi, if he pays any attention to the attacks of which he is so constantly the object, can always console himself by reflecting that, after all, not half so much has been said against his operas as it was once the fashion to say against Rossini's. The Italians, on the other hand, can be fairly reproached with this, that, to the present day, they have never appreciated _Don Giovanni_. They consent to play it in London, Paris and St. Petersburgh because the musical public of the capitals know the work and are convinced that nothing finer has ever been written; (this is, however, less in Paris than in the other two capitals of the Italian Opera), but the singers themselves do not in their hearts like Mozart. They are kind enough to execute his music, because they are well paid for it, but that is all. [Sidenote: GERMAN AND ITALIAN MUSIC.] In the present century, which is above all an age of eclecticism, we find the natural descendants of Piccinni going over to the Gluckists, while the legitimate inheritors of Gluck abandon their succession to adopt the facile forms and sometimes unmeaning if melodious phrases of the Piccinnists. Certainly there are no traces of the grand old German school in the light popular music of Herr Flotow (who, if not a German, is a Germanised Russian); and, on the other hand, Signor Verdi in his emphatic moments quite belies his Italian origin; indeed, there are passages in several of this composer's operas which may be traced directly not to Rossini, but to Meyerbeer.