We have seen how Verdi, the greatest of Wagner’s contemporaries, was influenced by the German composer, and how his whole style underwent transformation as he imbibed deeper and deeper of the fountain of new methods and ideas which sprung from the study of such works as the _Ring_. Nor was Verdi alone of those of whom we have already spoken in being thus influenced, although the traces of such influence are not everywhere so apparent. Gounod, Ambroise Thomas, Sullivan, and many another wrote works during and after Wagner’s lifetime which owe at least something to what their composers had learned from him. [Sidenote: =Men of a Younger Generation=] But it is only natural that fuller results should be seen in the men of a younger generation, men happily alive and at work to-day, in various countries and of various nationalities. To these we may now devote a little attention. That they have by no means slavishly copied Wagner is of course readily admitted; at the same time it cannot be maintained that they have in any way advanced upon his work, and their success is largely dependent upon their ability to seize upon the chief merits of his models and to combine with them some of their own particular features of temperament, and of their individuality of style. The chief modern composers of opera living to-day are— (_a_) German—Goldmark, Humperdinck, Richard Strauss. (_b_) Italian—Boito, Puccini, Mascagni, Leoncavallo, Cilea, Mancinelli, Franchetti. (_c_) French—Saint-Saëns, Massenet, Messager, Bruneau, d’Indy, Charpentier, and Debussy. (_d_) English—Mackenzie, Stanford, Cowen, Bunning, Corder, de Lara, Ethel Smyth, McCunn, and others. [Sidenote: =The Slavs=] Before saying more about these composers, whom we can conveniently treat under the headings of the different nationalities to which they belong, we may turn aside a moment for a consideration of a school of composition that possesses peculiar and characteristic features of its own—namely, that of the Russian and Slav races. The most prominent of its representatives have lived and worked since the time of Wagner, but the strong national characteristics of the Slavs have prevented his influence from being so apparently marked as it is in the case of composers of the more western nations. The opera writers of this school are, in many cases, still living, but as death has taken from us Glinka and Tchaïkovsky, and more recently Dvŏrák, it will be as well to treat of the Slav composers in a separate chapter, making some slight endeavour to grasp some outline of the distinctive features which are theirs, and which colour all their compositions, whether for the stage or otherwise. CHAPTER XIII. SLAVONIC OPERA.[2] Early Russian composers—Glinka—Dargomijsky—Borodin— César-Cui—Tchaïkovsky—Polish opera—Bohemian opera —Dvŏrák—Other European countries.