of Beethoven, has preserved a fuller account
of that great composer's art as a player than we have of any of his
predecessors. He describes his technique as tremendous, better than
that of any virtuoso of his day. He was remarkably deft in connecting
the full chords, in which he delighted, without the use of the pedal.
His manner at the instrument was composed and quiet. He sat erect,
without movement of the upper body, and only when his deafness
compelled him to do so, in order to hear his own music, did he
contract a habit of leaning forward. With an evident appreciation of
the necessities of old-time music he had a great admiration for clean
fingering, especially in fugue playing, and he objected to the use of
Cramer's studies in the instruction of his nephew by Czerny because
they led to what he called a "sticky" style of play, and failed to
bring out crisp staccatos and a light touch. But it was upon
expression that he insisted most of all when he taught.

[Sidenote: _Music and emotion._]

More than anyone else it was Beethoven who brought music back to the
purpose which it had in its first rude state, when it sprang
unvolitionally from the heart and lips of primitive man. It became
again a vehicle for the feelings. As such it was accepted by the
romantic composers to whom he belongs as father, seer, and prophet,
quite as intimately as he belongs to the classicists by reason of his
adherence to form as an essential in music. To his contemporaries he
appears as an image-breaker, but to the clearer vision of to-day he
stands an unshakable barrier to lawless iconoclasm. Says Sir George
Grove, quoting Mr. Edward Dannreuther, in the passages within the
inverted commas:

[Sidenote: _Beethoven a Romanticist._]

"That he was no wild radical altering for the mere pleasure
of alteration, or in the mere search for originality, is
evident from the length of time during which he abstained
from publishing, or even composing works of pretension, and
from the likeness which his early works possess to those of
his predecessors. He began naturally with the forms which
were in use in his days, and his alteration of them grew
very gradually with the necessities of his expression. The
form of the sonata is 'the transparent veil through which
Beethoven seems to have looked at all music.' And the good
points of that form he retained to the last--the 'triune
symmetry of exp