“ In Dittersdorf’s quartets (at least six of which are worthy of their survival at the present day) the first violin leads indeed, but not more than is inevitable in such unsophisticated music where the normal place for melody is at the top. The appearance of greater vitality in the texture of Boccherini’s quintets is produced merely by the fact that, his special instrument being the violoncello, his displays of brilliance inevitably occur in the inner parts. Six of Dittersdorf’s symphonies on the Metamorphoses of Ovid were republished in 1899, the centenary of his death. ”

“ The prince gave the boy, now eleven years old, a place in his private orchestra—the first of the kind established in Vienna,—and also saw to it that he received an excellent general education. The Seven Years’ War proved disastrous to both music and morals; and young Ditters, who had fallen into evil ways, fled from Hildburghausen, whither he had gone with the prince, to avoid the payment of his gambling debts. His patron generously forgave and recalled him, but soon afterwards gave up his orchestra at Vienna. Ditters now obtained a place in the Vienna opera ”

“ In both of these branches his work still shows signs of life, and it is of great historical interest, since he was not only an excellent musician and a friend of Haydn but also a thoroughly popular writer, with a lively enough musical wit and sense of effect to embody in an amusing and fairly artistic form exactly what the best popular intelligence of the times saw in the new artistic developments of Haydn. ”