CONSERVATOIRE, a public institution for instruction in music and declamation. The name Conservatoire has come to be used not only of the French institutions to which it properly ap plies, but also of similar establishments in other countries. In the United States, however, the anglicized form "conservatory" is employed, a form far more satisfactory from the point of view of linguistic purity, but difficult to adopt in England, where the word has long since meant something quite different, to wit, a particular kind of greenhouse. The Italian conservatorios were the earliest, and originated in hospitals for the rearing of foundlings and orphans in which a musical education was given. The first to which a definite date can be assigned is the Conservatorio di Santa Maria di Loretto, at Naples, founded by Giovanni di Tappia in 1537. Three other similar schools were afterwards established in the city, of which the Conservatorio di Sant' Onofrio deserves special men tion on account of the fame of its teachers, such as Alessandro Scarlatti, Leo, Durante and Porpora.
The celebrated Conservatoire of Paris owes its origin to the cole Royale de Chant et de Declamation founded by Baron de Breteuil in 1784, for the purpose of training singers for the opera. Suspended during the stormy period of the Revolution, its place was taken by the Conservatoire de Musique, established in 1795 on the basis of a school for gratuitous instruction in military music, founded by the mayor of Paris in 1792. The plan and scale on which it was founded had to be modified more than once in suc ceeding years, but under the successive direction of eminent musicians, including Cherubini, Auber, Ambroise Thomas and Gabriel Faure, it thereafter occupied, as it continues to do, a fore most place among institutions of its kind. Of other European con servatoires of the first rank may be named those of Berlin, the famous Hochschule fur Musik, founded in 1869, and long directed by Joachim ; of Vienna, founded in 1817; of Leipzig, which as sumed such importance in the days of Mendelssohn, by whom it was founded in 1843 ; of Brussels, founded in 1833 and long pre sided over by the celebrated Fetis ; and of Cologne, founded in t 849 ; to mention but a few. In England the functions of a Con servatoire have been discharged by the Royal Academy of Music, of London, founded in 1822, which received a charter of incorpo ration in 183o, the Royal College of Music (1882), the Guildhall School of Music and similar institutions. In the United States the leading teaching institutions include the National Conservatory of Music of America, founded in New York in 1885, of which Dvorak was director for a time, the Institute of Musical Art and the American Institute of Applied Music, both also in New York. Other well-known American establishments are the Peabody Con servatory in Baltimore (1868), the Chicago Musical College (1869), the Cincinnati College of Music (1878), and the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston (187o).