and down the room, humming as usual, instead of singing--and opened
the piano. My wife had often asked him in vain to play; but now,
putting the text before him, he began a wonderful improvisation,
which, unfortunately, there were no magic means of recording. From
this fantasy he seemed to conjure the theme of the aria. Hours passed
but Beethoven continued to improvise. Supper, which he intended to
share with us, was served, but he would not be disturbed. Late in the
evening he embraced me and, without having eaten anything, hurried
home. The following day the piece was ready in all its beauty."

This anecdote appears to indicate that Beethoven sometimes composed at
the piano. Meyerbeer, it is said, always composed at his instrument,
and there is a story that he used to jot down the ideas of other
composers at the opera and concerts, and, by thinking and playing
these over, gradually evolve his own themes. It is rather more
surprising to hear, from Herr Pohl, that Haydn sketched all his
compositions at the piano. The condition of the instrument, he adds,
had its effect upon him, beauty of tone being favorable to
inspiration. Thus he wrote to Artaria in 1788: "I was obliged to buy a
new forte-piano, that I might compose your clavier sonatas
particularly well." "When an idea struck him he sketched it out in a
few notes and figures; this would be his morning's work; in the
afternoon he would enlarge this sketch, elaborating it according to
rule, but taking pains to preserve the unity of the idea."

Weber's son relates that it was his father's habit to sit at the
window on summer evenings and jot down the ideas that had come to him,
during his solitary walks, on small pieces of music paper, of which a
large number were usually lying on his table. "No piano," he adds,
"was touched on these occasions, for his ears spontaneously heard a
full orchestra, played by good spirits, while he wrote down his neat
little notes." And Weber himself remarks in one of his essays that,
"the tone poet who gets his ideas at the piano is almost always born
poor, or in a fair way of delivering his faculties into the hands of
the common and commonplace. For these very hands, which, thanks to
constant practice and training, finally acquire a sort of independence
and will of their own, are unconscious tyrants and masters over the
creative power. How very differently does _he_ create whose _inner_
ear is judge of the ideas which he simultaneously