[Illustration: PAGE FROM CONDUCTOR’S SCORE _Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony_] The Conductor must also have a literary and a poetic sense to understand the romantic and historical subjects, which composers so often select as themes; and he must have imagination to visualize a picture in his own mind before he can make his own Orchestra and his audience follow the music, or the phrases, that go to make up that picture, or that _musical impression of a picture_. In a certain sense, the Conductor _leads his audience_, though most of us are unconscious of his power in this particular. We, to a certain degree, see the musical picture that the Conductor sees; for we have only the threads he gives us—the scarlet and blue and green and purple and lilac and golden threads with which we may weave as we listen the beautiful musical tapestry, the cartoons for which may be said to lie in the pages of the score. Though it is often said that the “virtuoso-conductor” was practically unknown until the middle of the Nineteenth Century, that statement is far from correct. If you will read again the description of Lully’s Orchestra (pages 162-172) you will see that he has a splendidly trained body of highly artistic performers. Lully’s methods of polishing his material were not unlike those in use to-day. Corelli, too, must have polished his Orchestra highly; for his violinists all played as one man (see page 180). It is a great mistake to condemn performances of the past and to think that because tastes differed from ours that Orchestras were primitive. There was nothing primitive in the cultured days of the Renaissance, nor in those of Louis XIV. We may be very sure that the lutes and viols, with their complicated strings and intricate system of tuning, required _virtuosi_ to play them artistically and romantically to suit the culture of the age; and that the Conductors had something more to do than beat time, even if they sat at the _gravicembalo_, or harpsichord. Moreover, the audiences of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries were highly cultured men and women. There were also many brilliant amateur musicians. Perhaps, on the whole, amateurs reached as high a degree of excellence as they do to-day. Lully was undoubtedly a very great Conductor; and there does not seem to have been any one after him who stood for such perfect performances as his until Wagner pointed out the path for Conductors to follow.