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greater number of the instrumental performers. It is this circumstance which gives to this festival its peculiar excellence and beauty. From all the neighbouring towns and the whole country round the dilettanti were gathering, arriving in steamboats or Eilwagen, not to toil at an irksome ill-paid task, but for a great musical field-day, full of soul and song. All ranks and ages unite for the one harmonious end.… Add to this love of the art, good training, well cultivated taste, and general knowledge of music, and it is explained how such an effect is produced. You felt the life, the pulsation of this music, for their hearts as well as their understandings were in it. It was in this chorus and in this band that public interest was centred; the audience listened and enjoyed, but the amateur performers constituted the festival.'

The importance of these Rhine festivals, from an artistic point of view, was alluded to at the commencement of this record of them. The roll of eminent musicians of European fame who have conducted them alone claims such recognition; while the long catalogue of masterpieces performed, especially those for orchestra, in which English festivals are as a rule sadly deficient, is in itself an extraordinarily interesting and suggestive document. The following list of the number of times of performances of Beethoven's Symphonies at these Rhenish festivals gives a tolerably fair estimate of the proportionate admiration in which those masterpieces are held by the great composer's countrymen:—

App. p.731 "In the small list of symphonies at the end of the article, the right hand column should read as follows:—

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