f art."

(To Czerny, who was teaching music to Beethoven's nephew Karl.)

78. "Always place the hands at the key-board so that the fingers can not
be raised higher than is necessary; only in this way is it possible to
produce a singing tone."

(Reported by Schindler as Beethoven's view on pianoforte instruction.
He hated a staccato style of playing and dubbed it "finger dancing" and
"throwing the hands in the air.")

[PG Editor's Note: #79 was skipped in the 1905 edition--error?]

ON HIS OWN WORKS

80. "I haven't a single friend; I must live alone. But well I know that
God is nearer to me than to the others of my art; I associate with Him
without fear, I have always recognized and understood Him, and I have
no fear for my music,--it can meet no evil fate. Those who understand it
must become free from all the miseries that the others drag with them."

(To Bettina von Arnim. [Bettina's letter to Goethe, May 28, 1810.])

81. "The variations will prove a little difficult to play, particularly
the trills in the coda; but let that not frighten you. It is so disposed
that you need play only the trills, omitting the other notes because
they are also in the violin part. I would never have written a thing
of this kind had I not often noticed here and there in Vienna a man
who after I had improvised of an evening would write down some of my
peculiarities and make boast of them next day. Foreseeing that these
things would soon appear in print I made up my mind to anticipate
them. Another purpose which I had was to embarrass the local pianoforte
masters. Many of them are my mortal enemies, and I wanted to have my
revenge in this way, for I knew in advance that the variations would be
put before them, and that they would make exhibitions of themselves."

(Vienna, November 2, 1793, to Eleonore von Breuning, in dedicating to
her the variations in F major, "Se vuol ballare." [The pianist whom
Beethoven accuses of stealing his thunder was Abbe Gelinek.])

82. "The time in which I wrote my sonatas (the first ones of the second
period) was more poetical than the present (1823); such hints were
therefore unnecessary. Every one at that time felt in the Largo of the
third sonata in D (op. 10) the pictured soulstate of a melancholy being,
with all the nuances of light and shade which occur in a delineation
of melancholy and its phases, without requiring a key in the shape of a
superscriptio