Of the famous symphonies he
assigned first place to that in C minor, No. 5, which he thought stood
alone in the art of musical expression, peerless and unapproachable, a
unique emanation from the soul and mind of man. "It holds us in its
grasp," wrote Wagner of this composition, "as one of the rarer
conceptions of the master, in which Passion, aroused by Pain as its
original ground-tone, raises itself upward on the stepping-stone of
conciliation and exaltation to an outburst of Joy conscious of
Victory." Paul loved to play the Fifth Symphony as well as to hear it
performed by an orchestral band. When playing it he seemed to lose
touch with earth and to be transported to celestial heights. In his
marginalia he compares the methods of expression of Shakespeare with
those of Beethoven. That able critic, the late Professor Dowden, in
some penetrating observations on Shakespeare's works, wrote:

In the earliest plays the idea is at times hardly sufficient to
fill out the language; in the middle plays there seems a perfect
balance and equality between the thought and its expression; in
the latest plays this balance is disturbed by the preponderance,
or excess, of ideas over the means of giving them utterance.

After underlining this passage Paul made the comment: "An
extraordinary coincidence occurs to me in that the same thing happens
with Beethoven, the greatest of the absolute musicians. Anyone must
see that in the last symphony (No. 9 in D minor) he seems often at a
loss how to put his feelings into shape (or sound), as though musical
style up to his time could not express the intensity of his ideas.
Hence in this symphony there is a distinct lack of balance--a defect
which is absent from the works of his middle period (_e.g._, Symphony
No. 5 or No. 7)."

Another Beethoven work that he loved was the Third Symphony in E Flat,
with its epic opening; the mournful beauty of its funeral march, now
sad, calm, solemn like a moonless, starless night, now shining with
gleams of hope and faith; its crisp and lively scherzo; and the
triumphant finale, a veritable ecstasy of divine joy. My son as an
historical scholar found a peculiar attraction in this symphony by
reason of its association with Napoleon Buonaparte, for it was
inspired by Beethoven's belief--formed in those days when the soldier
of the Revolution was regarded as the liberator of peoples and the
enemy only of the old feudal order--that Nap