[34] The appearance of a Mozart symphony on a program of 1797 is distinctly noteworthy. Hippeau in _Berlioz et son temps_ quotes from the _Journal des Débats_ of 1801 to the effect that the best orchestra in France, after ten rehearsals, found a symphony of Mozart beyond its power, setting a precedent for the orchestra of the Vienna Opera House, which succumbed to the difficulties of _Tristan und Isolde_ after forty-seven rehearsals--if we remember rightly. CHAPTER IV EARLY MUSICAL ORGANIZATIONS Origin of musical societies--The South; The St. Cecilia of Charleston; Philadelphia and New York in the eighteenth century--The Euterpean Society, the New York Choral Society; Sacred Music Society; other New York Societies--New England in the eighteenth century; the Stoughton Musical Society of Boston; other societies in Boston and elsewhere. All over the country in the last decade of the eighteenth century there is noticeable a decline in the musical taste of the American people as represented in their public musical life. This was due probably to a variety of causes, chief among which seems to have been the influx, after the Revolution, of a flood of immigrants lacking the culture which the colonists had inherited or through long-settled and prosperous residence acquired. The second decade of the nineteenth century, however, saw a renaissance of musical activity, which was developed into vigorous life chiefly through the agency of definitely constituted musical organizations. The concerts of the eighteenth century, on the whole, were rendered possible by a coöperation between people of culture, which in itself constituted a loose sort of organization. This coöperation, indeed, crystallized about the middle of the century into a number of avowedly musical societies. The history of the earliest of these is wrapped in considerable obscurity and there is an impressive number of them claiming to be called the first. The claim can never satisfactorily be determined, for it is quite impossible to define categorically the limits of a musical organization. Broadly, the term covers any number of people coöperating for a musical purpose, and would include a singing class of half a dozen members as fittingly as a modern orchestra or a musical society of hundreds.