main intentions broadly carried out, leaving a good deal of minor detail to look after itself, and not complaining if a few notes fell under the desks at the back of the orchestra.  Lamoureux had laboriously rehearsed every inch of his repertory until it was note-perfect, and each of his men knew the precise bowing, phrasing, degree of piano or forte, and tempo of every minutest phrase.  Now I do not mean by this that the orchestras on which Richter and Mottl performed played many wrong notes, while the Lamoureux orchestra played none; and still less do I mean that Lamoureux got finer results than Richter or Mottl.  So far as the mere notes are concerned, the Englishmen who played for the German conductors acquitted themselves quite as well as the Frenchmen who played for Lamoureux.  Both made mistakes at times; and a seemingly paradoxical thing is that when a Lamoureux man stumbled all the world was bound to hear it, whereas in our English orchestras a score of mistakes might be made in an evening without many of us being much the wiser.  The reason for this is the reason why the playing of Lamoureux on his trained orchestra, for all its accuracy, was not better than, nor in many respects so good as, the playing of Richter and Mottl on the scratch orchestras which their agents engaged for them.  Probably few uninformed laymen have any notion of the extent to which mere noise is responsible for the total effect of a Wagner piece or a Beethoven symphony—­not the noise of big drum, cymbals and so on; but the continuous slight discords caused by some of the players being various degrees in front and others various degrees behind; the scratching produced by uncertain bowing, or by an unfortunate fiddler finding himself a little behind the general body (as he does sometimes) and making a savage rush to catch it up; the hissing of panting flautists; and the barnyard noises produced by exhausted oboe-players.  Even with Richter, stolid and trustworthy though he is, these unauthorised sounds count for a great deal; and with a conductor like Mottl, who varies the tempo freely in obedience to his mood in the most rapid pieces, they count for very much more.  They result in a continuous murmur which, so to speak, fills the interstices in the network of the music, covering wrong notes, and giving the mass of tone a richness and unity which otherwise it would lack.  In such movements as the Finale of the Fifth symphony this continuous murmur does the work done for the piano by the upper strings without dampers and the lower ones when the pedal is pressed down; it gives solidity and colour to the music; and certainly half the effect in fine renderings of “The Flying Dutchman” overture, the Walkuerenritt, and the Fire-music, is due to it.  But Lamoureux’s men had practised so long together under their conductor’s beat that all the instruments played like one instrument, no matter how the tempo was varied; the bowing of each passage had been considered and finally settled,