Thus all the conditions precedent for the elevation of the art were just at this time fulfilled at Vienna, and in one department--that of instrumental music--they existed in a degree unknown in any other city. The extraordinary results as to the quantity produced in those years may be judged from the sale-catalogue (1779) of a single music-dealer, Johann Traeg, which gives of symphonies, symphonies-concertantes and overtures (the last being in a small minority) the extraordinary number of 512. The music produced at private concerts given by the nobility ranged from the grand oratorios, operas, symphonies, down to variations for the pianoforte and to simple songs. Leading musicians and composers, whose circumstances admitted of it, also gave private concerts at which they made themselves and their works known, and to which their colleagues were invited. Prince Lobkowitz, at the time Beethoven reached Vienna, was a young man of twenty years. He was born on December 7, 1772, and had just married, on August 2, a daughter of Prince Schwarzenberg. He was a violinist of considerable powers and so devoted a lover of music and the drama, so profuse a squanderer of his income upon them, as in twenty years to reduce himself to bankruptcy. Precisely Beethoven’s supposed age, the aristocrat of wealth and power and the aristocrat of talent and genius became exceedingly intimate, occasionally quarrelling and making up their differences as if belonging by birth to the same sphere. The reigning Prince Esterhazy was that Paul Anton who, after the death of his father on February 25, 1790, broke up the musical establishment at Esterhaz and gave Haydn relief from his thirty years of service. He died on January 22, 1794, and was succeeded by his son Nicholas, a young man just five years older than Beethoven. Prince Nicholas inherited his grandfather’s taste for music, reëngaged an orchestra, and soon became known as one of the most zealous promoters of Roman Catholic church-music. The best composers of Vienna, including Beethoven, wrote masses for the chapel at Esterhaz, where they were performed with great splendor. Count Johann Nepomuk Esterhazy, “of the middle line zu Frakno,” was a man of forty-five years, a good performer upon the oboe, and (which is much to his credit) had been a firm friend and patron of Mozart. Of Count Franz Esterhazy, a man of thirty-five years, Schönfeld, in his “Jahrbuch der Tonkunst,” thus speaks: “This great friend of music at certain times of the year gives large and splendid concerts at which, for the greater part, large and elevated compositions are performed--particularly the choruses of Handel, the ‘Sanctus’ of Emanuel Bach, the ‘Stabat Mater’ of Pergolese, and the like. At these concerts there are always a number of the best virtuosos.”