A few introductory words as to the title and the contents of the present volume may not seem out of place. The title denotes the plan of a comprehensive work dealing with the history of Music in this country during the reign of Queen Victoria—a reign which, amongst other important events, has witnessed the revival of Music as a national art in England; the contents are a first instalment of such a work, on the reception of which the completion of the whole must largely depend. A chronological arrangement of the vast material at hand, an account of musical events from day to day, from season to season, might have produced a very learned, but would to a certainty have produced a very dull work, useful perhaps to the historian and critic, but religiously shunned by the general public. I have therefore preferred to group dates and facts round certain men of light and leading, and I shall be glad to think that the care and trouble with which those dates and facts have been collected and verified from contemporary sources may not be noticed by the ordinary reader at all.

As a matter of courtesy, I have given the pas to the great foreign masters who have visited our shores during the period under notice. How they have fared amongst us, what they have done and left undone, how they have permanently influenced the current of English Music—all this, for the first time, will be discussed in the following pages, with such care and minuteness of research as have not to my knowledge been previously bestowed upon so interesting a subject.