The progress of music above spoken of was arrested by the anarchy and the civil and other wars that began to rage in Poland with such fury in the middle of the last century.  King Stanislas Poniatowski (1764-1795) is credited with having exercised great influence on the music of Poland; at any rate, he patronised the arts and sciences right royally.  The Italian opera at Warsaw cannot have been of mean standing, seeing that artists such as the composers Paisiello and Cimarosa, and the great violinist, composer, and conductor Pugnani, with his pupil Viotti (the latter playing second violin in the orchestra), were members of the company.  And the King’s band of foreign and native players has been called one of the best in Europe.  Still, all this was but the hothouse bloom of exotics.  To bring about a natural harvest of home produce something else was wanted than royal patronage, and this something sprang from the series of disasters that befell the nation in the latter half of the last century, and by shaking it to its very heart’s core stirred up its nobler self.  As in literature, so in music, the national element came now more and more into action and prominence.

Up to 1778 there had been heard in Poland only Italian and French operas; in this year, for the first time, a Polish opera was put on the stage.  It is true the beginning was very modest.  The early attempts contained few ensemble pieces, no choruses, and no complex finales.  But a new art does not rise from the mind of a nation as Minerva is said to have risen from the head of Jupiter.  Nay, even the fact that the first three composers of Polish operas (Kamienski, Weynert, and Kajetani) were not Poles, but foreigners endeavouring to write in the Polish style, does not destroy the significance of the movement.  The following statistics will, no doubt, take the reader by surprise:—­From the foundation of the national Polish opera in 1778 till April 20, 1859, 5,917 performances of 285 different operas with Polish words took place in Poland.  Of these 92 were national Polish operas, the remaining 193 by Italian, French, and German composers; 1,075 representations being given of the former, 4,842 of the latter.  The libretti of 41 of the 92 Polish operas were originals, the other 51 were translations.  And, lastly, the majority of the 16 musicians who composed the 92 Polish operas were not native Poles, but Czechs, Hungarians, and Germans [footnote:  Ladislas von Trocki, Die Entwickelung der Oper in Polen. (Leipzig, 1867.)]

A step hardly less important than the foundation of a national opera was the formation, in 1805, of a Musical Society, which had for its object the improvement as well as the amusement of its members.  The idea, which originated in the head of one of the Prussian officials then in Warsaw, finding approval, and the pecuniary supplies flowing in abundantly, the Oginski Palace was rented and fitted up, two masters were engaged for the teaching of solo and choral singing,