Jay Coburn

This was a big deal.

The press was full of rumors about nefarious forces trying to interfere.

This kind of thing seemed to happen to Sax all the time.

Throughout his career, you can find wild tales of shadowy enemies and their plans to thwart him.

There's one story of a bomb being planted in Sax's bed.

I found another story of one of Sax's top employees being murdered, stabbed through the heart by an assassin who mistook him for his boss.

Apparently.

These stories are possibly true, and lots of them originate in sensational newspaper reports or biographies where the original source was Sachs himself or his close family.

But it's clear that he had made a lot of enemies.

And on the day of the Battle of the Bands, seven of Sax's musicians really didn't show up.

They were apparently, apparently bribed to stay out of the way.

But that didn't stop Sax, who played some of the instruments himself.

Among the audience were members of the military commission, journalists, artists, and senior officers.

They were there to judge the quality of the sound and how well it carried outdoors.

These were louder instruments, probably in closer harmony because of Sax's scientific approach, played outdoors by military bands, and the sax band had much more bass presence thanks to his sax horns.

I've got a properly French quote translated from a newspaper here.

A Stradivarius violin compared with a violin from the village.

A glass of generous Bordeaux next to an adulterated beverage made in Surrey.

That's a suburb of Paris.

That is the difference which exists between the old music and that proposed by Monsieur Saxe.