Page:The music of Bohemia.djvu/52

 PART III

the saying, "Where there is a Czech—there you hear music," may be exaggerated, nevertheless it was the observation of the neighboring nations that the people of Bohemia were from earliest times very fond of music. Richard Wagner, in his novel, The Pilgrimage to Beethoven, pays high tribute to the Czech performing musicians. He relates in it a story of a young musical enthusiast, who traveled from Paris to Vienna to see Beethoven. In the woods on the Bohemian border he met a group of wandering Czech musicians, who on the road under the blue sky played for him Beethoven's Septet with such profound understanding that he pronounced their performance of this work the best he ever heard.

It was the enthusiasm of a real love for music which accomplished the formation, for instance, of the Associations of the Prague and of the Moravian Teachers of Public Schools, two bodies which perform male choruses a