The very terms in which the recommendation was couched show that Mendelssohn was not unconscious of the faults that marred the best orchestral playing of his time; but being of a mild, easy-going disposition, he was not the man to expect impossibilities--such is the ordinary musician's term for any exertion a little out of his ordinary routine. It was reserved for a more masterful mind to expect impossibilities, and to obtain them. When the works of Wagner began to attract attention, consternation fell on all the old-fashioned conductors of Germany, the "Pig-tails" as Wagner never wearied of calling them. Life was not worth living, they felt, if they had to deal with such scores, and then lamentations were reinforced by the bandsmen, who found that countless passages written by Wagner were impossible of performance. But it so happened, as if by a special Providence, that along with Wagner certain performing musicians, who were not so easily frightened, had been ripening towards their life's task. From Liszt and Von Bülow presently came demonstrations of the fact that Wagner's music was not so impossible as at first thought to be, though requiring a method of interpretation different from that of the "Pig-tails." In 1869 appeared Wagner's pamphlet "On Conducting," just three years after his first meeting with Hans Richter, and, whatever may be thought of the style of that pamphlet, it is beyond question that it marks the beginning of a new era in the history of orchestral music. Besides Richter, all modern conductors of world-wide reputation--Bülow, Levi, Seidl, Weingartner and Richard Strauss--were found in the same school. They learned from Wagner how to play Beethoven, and their method has revolutionised the musical world. Now that Bülow is gone, the acknowledged leader and master of them all is Hans Richter, the incarnate genius of musical interpretation. To Richter's influence and example, far more than to anything else that could be named, is due that prodigious improvement in the standard of orchestral performance all over the world, which is the most notable feature in the history of music during the past thirty years. Principally owing to Richter's matchless combination of artistic enthusiasm, practical mastery, and genial good sense, we now hear things that musical prophets and wise men, such as Beethoven desired to hear and had not heard. Hans Richter belongs to a German family of musicians. He was born at Raab, in Hungary, in 1843, and, after a good musical grounding, entered the Conservatorium at Vienna in 1859. He chose the horn as his principal instrument, but his gift for playing musical instruments was so prodigiously strong that in the course of a few years he acquired the technical control of all the more important instruments in the orchestra, besides pianoforte and organ.