and though enjoyable, has nothing
commanding about it. The musician, more than any artist, reflects his
character and trend of life in his work.

This sense of humor, inherent in the mental equipment of Beethoven,
enabled him to enjoy a joke as well as give it, to perceive a ridiculous
situation and extract due amusement from it, to appropriate it wherever
he found it. But singularly enough, when the point of a joke was turned
against himself, his sense of humor failed him utterly. He would often
become angry in such cases and the perpetrator would come in for a round
of abuse which made him chary of attempting it again.

Very bad music of which there was a sufficiency already in those times,
gave him great amusement, which he manifested by roars of laughter, we
are informed by Seyfried, who saw more or less of him during a period
covering a quarter of a century. "All his friends," says Seyfried,
"recognized that in the art of laughter, Beethoven was a virtuoso of the
first rank." He often laughed aloud when nothing had occurred to excite
laughter, and would in such case ascribe his own thoughts and fancies as
the cause. Naive and simple as a child himself, he could only see the
naivete in the worthless compositions above referred to, and could not
understand the small ambition back of the pitiful effort. He often
unintentionally afforded equally great amusement to others by his own
naivete. Thus he once told Stein, of the noted family of pianoforte
makers that some of the strings in his Broadwood were out of order or
lacking, and to illustrate it, caught up a bootjack and struck the keys
with it. Ries states that Beethoven several times in his awkwardness
emptied the contents of the ink-stand into the piano. On this same piano
the master was often begged to improvise. The instrument was a present
from the manufacturers, and when made, was probably the best example of
its kind extant. It later came into the possession of Liszt.

Beethoven's love of a joke was such that it appears in the title to one
of his works, the opus 129. It is a rondo a capriccio for piano, with
the title, Die Wuth ueber den verlorenen Groschen (fury over a lost
penny), of which Schumann says "it would be difficult to find anything
merrier than this whim. It is the most harmless amiable anger."

Beethoven was ready in repartee, and full of resources, with a wit that
was spontaneous and equal to any emergency. One New-year's day, as he
and Schi