Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/243

Rh Moravia, and above all in Bohemia. Burney records that every village in Bohemia had a public school where the children were taught music just as they were taught to read and write. He inspected some of them. At Czaslau, near Collin, he found "a class of young children of both sexes occupied in reading, writing, and playing the violin, the oboe, the bassoon and other instruments. The organist of the church, who improvised magnificently on a sorry little organ, had, in a small room, four harpsichords, on which his small pupils practised." At Budin, near Lobeschutz, more than a hundred children of both sexes were taught music, singing and playing in the Church.

Unhappily the skill thus acquired was stifled by poverty. "The majority of these children were destined for inferior situations of a menial or domestic nature, and music remained for them simply a private recreation; which is perhaps, after all," says Burney philosophically "the best and most honourable use to which music could be applied." The rest entered the service of wealthy landowners, who with these servants made up orchestras and gave concerts. The nobility of Bohemia made the mistake of detaching themselves unduly from its interesting peasantry, living for the greater part of the year in Vienna, "If the Bohemians," says Burney, "had the advantages enjoyed by the Italians they would surpass them. They are perhaps the most musical race in all Europe." They excelled above all in the playing of wind-instruments: wood-wind toward the Saxon frontier and brass in the direction of Moravia.—It was one of these Bohemian schools that trained the reformer of instrumental music, the creator