Excerpt from Musical Composers and Their Works: For the Use of Schools and Students in Music Have only to say. As I said in the prefaces to the com panion works, Old Masters, and Modern Painters, that this book is a simple account of the great men of whom it treats, and of their works. It is designed for the use of young people in the course of their musical education, and for older persons who have neither the time nor the opportunity to refer to original sources of information. I have neither attempted nor desired to make the book exhaus tive. I wish to apologize for the tlisproportionate length to which I have allowed the sketches of Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Moscheles to extend. Fearing that, in the nature of the work, it was apt to lapse into a mere dry catalogue of names and dates, repellant to most readers, young or old, I was fain, when I had ample and very attractive material, to bring out the human element with all the skill in my power. With regard to the three first composers. Their high standing was enough to warrant the prominence granted to them. In the case of Moscheles, it seemed to me that it was well to give in detail the account of one great musical composer in the second rank. His intimate connection with the first musical composers throughout his long life rendered him also a link between the past and the present in the annals of music. 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.