of enthusiastic admiration. Haydn called him the greatest
of composers. In fertility of invention, beauty of form, and exactness
of method, he has never been surpassed, and has but one or two rivals.
The composer of three of the greatest operas in musical history, besides
many of much more than ordinary excellence; of symphonies that rival
Haydn's for symmetry and melodic affluence; of a great number of
quartets, quintets, etc.; and of pianoforte sonatas which rank high
among the best; of many masses that are standard in the service of the
Catholic Church; of a great variety of beautiful songs--there is hardly
any form of music which he did not richly adorn with the treasures of
his genius. We may well say, in the words of one of his most competent
critics:

"Mozart was a king and a slave--king in his own beautiful realm of
music; slave of the circumstances and the conditions of this world.
Once over the boundaries of his own kingdom, and he was supreme; but the
powers of the earth acknowledged not his sovereignty."

BEETHOVEN.

I.

The name and memory of this composer awaken, in the heart of the lover
of music, sentiments of the deepest reverence and admiration. His life
was so marked with affliction and so isolated as to make him, in his
environment of conditions as a composer, a unique figure.

The principal fact which made the exterior life of Beethoven so bare of
the ordinary pleasures that brighten and sweeten existence, his total
deafness, greatly enriched his spiritual life. Music finally became to
him a purely intellectual conception, for he was without any sensual
enjoyment of its effects. To this Samson of music, for whom the ear was
like the eye to other men, Milton's lines may indeed well apply:

"Oh! dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon!
Irrecoverably dark--total eclipse,
Without all hope of day!
Oh first created Beam, and thou, great Word,
'Let there be light,' and light was over all,
Why am I thus bereaved thy prime decree?
The sun to me is dark."

To his severe affliction we owe alike many of the defects of his
character and the splendors of his genius. All his powers, concentrated
into a spiritual focus, wrought such things as lift him into a solitary
greatness. The world has agreed to measure this man as it measures
Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare. We do not compare him with others.

Beethoven had the reputation among his contemporaries of being