ABSTRACT
DESPITE the fa.ct that France produced no creative artist of the highest rank, with the' possible exception of Rameauwho, however, as we have alrea.dy observed, belongs in spirit to the preceding age-Paris remained the centre of operatic activities throughout the greater part of the eighteenth century. The most important developments in the field of instrumental music, on the contrary, took place in Austria, although actually out of the four great masters' who constitute the chief glory of the so-called Viennese school, only one can properly be said to belong to that city or even to be an Austrian in the strict sense of the word, namely Franz Schubert Of the others. Joseph Haydn was a Croatian peasant by birth, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, though a native of Salzburg, was essentially a cosmopolitan, Ludwig van Beethoven was a German of Dutch descent, and the extent to which they constitute a school has been greatly exaggerated They wrote in the same fonne, but treated them entirely differently; they employed to a great extent the same vocabulary, but they expressed widely divergent ideas and emotions.
