Like the princes in the seventeenth century, or the middle classes in the nineteenth, it was the nobles in the eighteenth who played the part of Maecenas; and under their patronage appears, for the first time, a precisely marked musical society. Here too, in music, the nobility became an invaluable link between the artistic court and that public interest in art which, it would seem, is the necessary condition of all future advance. Even in the didactic musical romance which old Kuhnau wrote in 1700 under the title of “The Musical Quack,” we miss the type of the amateur Maecenas. In the background, invisible, stands the prince who keeps the chapel; in the foreground there are only musicians and quacks. The amateur who is not a quack, the genuine dilettante, first attains importance in the beginning of the century; but very shortly the concerts which are given in the salons of the Fürnbergs, Esterhazys, and Schwarzenbergs, do more for the beneficial advancement of art than even the devotion of a keenly musical court such as that of Frederick the Great at first was. The greater courts, like Dresden and Munich, begin somewhat to decline, while the smaller advance, and in England, Italy, and elsewhere, the nobility, who are not unlike small sovereign princes, aid the spread and development of music. The nobility are soon followed by the gentry; but it was not till the Revolution had shattered the nobles that the bourgeois Maecenas steps upon the scene. In this displacement of old relations it was inevitable that the clavier should play its important part; in accordance with its social nature it advanced more and more from an accompanying or supplementary instrument into an independent centre of drawing-room existence, as well as of bourgeois evening parties. Thus, in the attractive and successful pieces of the generation from 1750 to 1800, its popularity was for the first time established. Old Bach had as yet been the most serious professional musician who had yielded to “galant” impulses; and his concessions to the popular taste were only by the way. The distinction between public improvisation on set themes, and public interpretation of written works, was not yet sharply defined. The player was at his highest when he extemporised variations or fugues on a given subject. Such had been the improvisations of Sebastian Bach; but the spirit of improvisation, as it lives in the works of Philip Emanuel, is something quite different. In him the hand directly follows the inner feeling, constructs easily and simply, and plays for the sake of the playing, not for the sake of the art. Before the clavier had become a social instrument, this division of labour between composers and players had become imperative; reproduction was bound to diverge into a separate branch. The amateur, on whom more and more the art depends, is incapable of composing, but he will, on his clavier, hear the works