Such facts as we know of the music life of that early time are of anecdotal rather than musical interest. They bespeak a sporadic musical activity which no doubt contributed tangibly to the music life in the large centers during the earlier nineteenth century. The city of New Orleans would seem to be exceptional in this respect. French in origin, then Spanish, again French, and finally purchased by the United States in 1803, it was a flourishing music center, and in the first half of the nineteenth century produced composers like Louis Gottschalk, who achieved a success and a reputation that was more than local or national, and that, on a certain level, still persists. The music life of New Orleans declined after the Civil War, as did the city itself, for some decades; however, the music life which had flourished there was of little influence on later developments in other parts of the country. During the nineteenth century the United States seems to have received its real musical education. In 1825 Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, at that time professor of Italian literature at Columbia University, and Manuel Garcia, famous both as singer and teacher, were among those who established a first operatic theater in New York, which city thereby became acquainted with the most celebrated operatic works and artists of the time. In 1842 the New York Philharmonic Society, the oldest of our orchestras, was founded. Farther reaching was the influence of individual musicians like Lowell Mason in Boston, and Carl Bergmann, Leopold Damrosch, and Theodore Thomas, in New York and elsewhere--men who worked devotedly, indefatigably, and intelligently to bring the work of classic and contemporary composers before the American public. Mason and Thomas, toward the midcentury, organized and performed concerts of chamber music and provided the impulse toward an increasingly intense activity of this kind. Bergmann, as conductor of the New York orchestra, and, later, Thomas and Damrosch, led the way with orchestral concerts; the list of works which they introduced to the American repertory is as impressive as can be imagined. In addition to his activities in New York, Thomas also organized the biennial festivals at Cincinnati, and eventually became the first conductor of the Chicago orchestra--a post which he held until his death in 1905.