Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/241

Rh The Germans, on the other hand, are quite at home in the nascent symphony. Their natural taste for instrumental music, the necessity in which numbers of the little German Courts found themselves of confining themselves to such music, as the result of a strict application of the principles of the Reformed Church, which forbade them to maintain an opera-house, the gregarious instinct which impelled the German musicians to unite in small societies, in small "colleges," in order to play together, instead of practising the individualism of the Italian virtuosi—all these things—everything, in short—even to the comparative inferiority of German singing, was bound to contribute to the universal development of instrumental music in Germany. Nowhere in Europe were there more schools in which it was taught, or more good orchestras.

One of the most curious musical institutions in Germany was that of the "Poor Scholars," which corresponded (save that they were on a less generous scale) with the conservatoires for poor children in Naples. These Scholars, troops of whom Burney met in the streets of Frankfort, Munich, Dresden and Berlin, had in each city of the Empire "a school confided to the Jesuits, where they were taught to play instruments and to sing." The Munich school contained eighty children from eleven to twelve years of age. Before being admitted they had already to be able to play an instrument or to give signs of a marked vocation for music. They were kept at school until their twentieth year. They were boarded, fed, and taught, but not clothed. They had partly to earn their living by singing or playing in the streets. This was an absolute obligation upon them, "so that