Octave Séré ("Musiciens français d'Aujourd'hui") says of it: "Les principaux traits de son caractère et l'influence du sol natal s'y combinent étrangement. De l'alliance de la mer et du Pays Basque (Ravel was born in the Basses-Pyrénées, near the sea) est née une musique à la fois fluide et nerveusement rythmée, mobile, chatoyante, amie du pittoresque et dont le trait net et précis est plus incisif que profond." Hugo Wolf's opera _Der Corregidor_ is founded on the novel, "El Sombrero de tres Picos," of the Spanish writer, Pedro de Alarcón (1833-91). His unfinished opera _Manuel Venegas_ also has a Spanish subject, suggested by Alarcón's "El Niño de la Bola." Other Spanish operas are Beethoven's _Fidelio_, Balfe's _The Rose of Castile_, Verdi's _Ernani_ and _Il Trovatore_, Rossini's _Il Barbiere di Siviglia_, Mozart's _Don Giovanni_ and _Le Nozze di Figaro_, Weber's _Preciosa_ (really a play with incidental music), Dargomijsky's _The Stone Guest_ (Pushkin's version of the Don Juan story. This opera, by the way, was one of the many retouched and completed by Rimsky-Korsakow), Reznicek's _Donna Diana_--and Wagner's _Parsifal_! The American composer John Knowles Paine's opera _Azara_, dealing with a Moorish subject, has, I think, never been performed. II The early religious composers of Spain deserve a niche all to themselves, be it ever so tiny, as in the present instance. There is, to be sure, some doubt as to whether their inspiration was entirely peninsular, or whether some of it was wafted from Flanders, and the rest gleaned in Rome, for in their service to the church most of them migrated to Italy and did their best work there. It is not the purpose of the present chronicler to devote much space to these early men, or to discuss in detail their music. There are no books in English devoted to a study of Spanish music, and few in any language, but what few exist take good care to relate at considerable length (some of them with frequent musical quotation) the state of music in Spain in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, the golden period. To the reader who may wish to pursue this phase of our subject I offer a small bibliography. There is first of all A. Soubies's two volumes, "Histoire de la Musique d'Espagne," published in 1889. The second volume takes us through the eighteenth century. The religious and early secular composers are catalogued in these volumes, but there is little attempt at detail, and he is a happy composer who is awarded an entire page. Soubies does not find occasion to pause for more than a paragraph on most of his subjects. Occasionally, however, he lightens the plodding progress of the reader, as when he quotes Father Bermudo's "Declaración de Instrumentos" (1548; the 1555 edition is in the Library of Congress at Washington): "There are three kinds of instruments in music. The first are called natural; these are men, of whom the song is called _musical harmony_.