We have now reviewed in highly summary fashion some of the chief schools, with their most representative masters, that may be noted in a bird’s-eye view of the history of instrumental music. As for the other great branch of the art, music associated with literature, and especially its most important manifestation, the opera, classification according to artistic principles is both more difficult and less necessary, since the opera can very well be studied by countries rather than by schools. The reader will at any rate find in his study of opera that one or two clear conceptions of the national or racial character of the three peoples who have done the most important work in the operatic field, the Italians, the French, and the Germans, will help him more than æsthetic standards difficult to apply to an æsthetic hybrid which is neither drama nor music. Thus the Italian sensuousness has been both the blessing and the curse of opera in Italy: the blessing by keeping it simple and tuneful, as in so much of Rossini (1792-1868), Bellini (1802-1835), Donizetti (1798-1848), the early Verdi (1813-1901), and even such moderns as Mascagni and Leoncavallo; the curse of opening the door to all sorts of absurdities on the dramatic side, and to the abuse of the power of the singers in meaningless virtuosity. Again, the keen dramatic sense of the French has helped to minimize such absurdities in works produced by their composers or at their national opera house under their national influence, as for instance those of Gluck (1714-1787), Cherubini (1760-1842), Meyerbeer (1791-1864), and others. Finally the warmth of sentiment of the Germans, their unrivalled faculty for getting at the emotional essence of a situation and expressing it in music, must be accorded a large part in the power of the romantic operas of the German Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826) and the music dramas of Richard Wagner (1813-1883). In revenge the Teutonic deficiency of dramatic sense and tolerance of tedium are to some extent accountable for those long stagnations of the action in the Wagnerian dramas which the most ardent admirers of Wagner the musician no longer deny.