II Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century Boston lagged considerably behind New York in the matter of orchestral music. After the demise of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra in 1824 the city was without any permanent symphonic organization until 1840, when the Academy of Music established an orchestra. During its existence of seven years the Academy orchestra varied in size from twenty-five to forty performers, many of whom were amateurs. It introduced to Boston most of the standard symphonies and some other works of importance, but its ambition seems to have been greater than its ability. It was succeeded in 1847 by the Musical Fund Society, founded in imitation of the Philadelphia society of that name, by Thomas Comer. Comer leaned emphatically to the popular in music and there was little value to the performances of the Musical Fund until George J. Webb took over the leadership during the last few years of the society's life, which ended in 1855. In the meantime Boston had been enjoying good music through the agency of the Germania Orchestra, a body of young German musicians who had come to America during the revolutionary troubles of 1848. The Germania was a travelling orchestra, but it gave a large proportion of its concerts in Boston. Its conductors were successively Carl Lenschow and Carl Bergmann and there seems to be little doubt that it was by far the best orchestra America had yet heard. In 1855 Carl Zerrahn, flute player of the Germania, founded an orchestra which became known as the Philharmonic and which gave regular concerts in Boston until 1863. He was invited, in 1866, to the conductorship of the orchestra newly formed by the Harvard Musical Association. This was really the first permanent orchestra of value that greater Boston possessed, and during the twenty years of its existence it clung with remarkable consistency to the highest musical ideals. Included in the works performed by it were the nine Beethoven symphonies; twelve Haydn and six Mozart symphonies, Spohr's _Die Weihe der Töne_; Schubert's B minor (unfinished) and C major; Mendelssohn's 'Italian,' 'Scotch,' and 'Reformation'; the four symphonies of Schumann; Gade's First, Second, Third, and Fourth; two of Raff and two of Brahms; Rubinstein's 'Ocean'; Berlioz's _Fantastique_; the Second of Saint-Saëns; two of Paine; one of Ritter; Liszt's symphonic poems, _Tasso_ and _Les Préludes_; Lachner's first suite and Raff's suite in C; Spohr's _Irdisches und Göttliches_ for double orchestra; and overtures by Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Cherubini, Schubert, Weber, Schumann, Gade, Bennett, Bargiel, Buck, Goldmark, Paine, Chadwick, Parker, Henschel, Rietz, and others. Nevertheless the Harvard Orchestra did not receive very warm support from the people of Boston. Among musicians, too, there grew up gradually a certain impatience at its undoubted conservatism and finally a rival was