It is during the eighteenth century that the classical symphony becomes a power that could seriously threaten the supremacy of vocal and dramatic music. The chief centres of symphonic activity are those places where northern and southern musical culture met――Vienna, Mannheim, and in a lesser degree Paris. It was in the north that the preparatory work had been done long before, in the music meetings at Oxford and in the _Collegium musicum_ of German universities. That movement towards instrumental music was largely due to the amateurs. It must not be forgotten that the orchestra of Prince Esterhazy for which Haydn composed symphonies was made up mainly from the domestic servants of the household. The Conservatoire at Vienna was founded by amateurs in order to provide them with help in their own private performances. The symphony, along with the string quartet and the sonata for harpsichord or pianoforte, was the means of transferring the musical expression of the Italian opera to the homes of people who had no opportunity of entering an Italian theatre. The operatic aria became idealized and transfigured in the process just as a hundred years later the operatic melodies of Bellini were transfigured in Chopin’s nocturnes. The spiritual result may be looked at in two ways, according to our temperament and our point of view. We may say that this transference conveys music to a higher æsthetic plane in that it removes it from the direct contact with physical human personality to a region of suggestion, association and evocation. Or we may say that in losing this direct contact we are losing touch with reality, that we are sentimentalizing the art until we prefer pretence to truth. It is at this stage of musical history that the fundamental æsthetic problem becomes acute, although it must have existed for centuries beforehand. That the problem was felt to be acute at the moment is shown by the appearance in 1750 of Baumgarten’s _Æsthetik_, which was the starting-point of modern æsthetic philosophy.