Excerpt from Music and Nationalism: A Study of English Opera To those who are familiar with the broad paths of Musical History, and more particularly with that narrow byway, English Opera, this book may seem to call, perhaps not for an apology, but at any rate for an explanation. So far as I am aware, no book has been wholly devoted either to giving an account of the forces which have influenced the Musical Stage in England, or even to drawing up that catalogue of Operatic names, dates, and places which, with a few personal likes and dis likes, generally does duty in this country for a serious aesthetic. It is as a first attempt to fill the former gap that this book has been written. My original intention was merely to mark what I may call the high and low-water marks of our English Operatic activity. But, in trying to bring them into some sort of co-ordination with our other national activities, so many difficulties arose, so many perplexing and apparently inexplicable phenomena came to light, that I was compelled to go outside the narrow limits which I had set myself and to study the more general relationships of National life and Musical Productivity. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.