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Simultaneously, Beethoven also started taking an interest in non-European music. The poet Franz Grillparzer reports that at a soirée in which the composer Georg Joseph Vogler was improvising upon a tune that he had purportedly collected from Africa during his voyage in the late 1790s, Beethoven listened to him carefully, even as others drifted away after a while. Later, Beethoven made a rare excursion into non-European musical exoticism in the Dance of the Dervishes from his music to the play, The Ruins of Athens (1811). The French composer Camille Saint-Saëns, who regularly spent long periods in North Africa, and took inspiration from some of its music, thought that Beethoven could not have composed the dance without having any authentic example in front of him.