Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/185

Rh as a rule, remained in the college for eight years. If, after a few years' training, they did not prove to be sufficiently talented, they were sent away. A certain number were received as paying boarders. The best pupils were retained, after this period of training, to become teachers in their turn.

Burney gives a picturesque description of a visit to the Collegio di San Onofrio:

On the first-floor landing a clarinet was pegging away; on the second-floor landing a horn was bellowing. In a common room seven or eight harpsichords, a still larger number of violins and some voices were performing each a different composition, while other pupils were writing. The beds served as tables for the harpsichords. In a second room the violoncellos were assembled; in a third, the flutes and oboes. The clarinets and horns had no other place than on the stairs. In the upper part of the house, and quite apart from the other children, sixteen young castrati had warmer rooms on account of the delicacy of their voices. All these little musicians were working unremittingly from rising (two hours before daybreak in winter) to going to bed (about eight o'clock in the evening); they had only an hour and a half for rest and dinner and a few days' vacation in the autumn.

These conservatoires, which were a mine of opera singers and composers for all Europe, were already nearing their decline in Burney's day. Their most brilliant period seems to have been in the first thirty years of the eighteenth century, in the lifetime of Alessandro Scarlatti.

There were in Naples foreign musical agents whose sole business it was to recruit musicians and sopranos for their managements. Such was a certain