is day, did not possess the prescience of Beethoven, who was able
to see over the pianoforte of his time and write as if he felt the
assurance of the nobler and yet nobler instruments of these later
times. Here he stands with Bach, who in his great Chromatic Fantasia
and Fugue requires and confidently expects the breadth of tone and the
power of the modern piano. It was Beethoven's fortune to live during
the early days of the modern instrument. Just after his death the era
of virtuoso piano playing began, the first appearances of Thalberg
having been made as early as about 1830. He was himself a great
pianist, as we see in the concertos which he wrote, always intending
to play them at some concert or other in near prospect. Occasionally
indeed he overshot his mark, as notably in the fifth, which, being
finished just before his concert in 1809, he found too difficult for
his fingers, whereupon he was obliged to fall back on the third.
Moreover, the pianists Hummel and Dussek were already before the
public, and Clementi had made his concert tours, and established the
lines of the classical technique upon its brilliant side. All these
influences find their illustration in the music of Beethoven, and
especially find illustration in the last and greatest of his
pianoforte sonatas. These beautiful tone poems were long regarded as
impossible. But the genius of Schumann and Liszt came to their rescue
by introducing a new style of touch and technique, which, when once
found, proved to be the link missing for the proper interpretation of
these till then obscure works.

Moreover, Beethoven occupied a different attitude toward the sonata
form from that which he held to the symphony. He deviated from the
sonata form in every direction, and this not alone in his later works,
when we might suppose he had become wearied with the repetition of his
ideas in the same order, but in his works of middle life, when as yet
he might apparently have gone on writing sonatas indefinitely, so
fresh, so novel and so varied were the tone pictures which he gave the
world under this name. He seems to have regarded music as an
improvisation, not to be held to some one fixed type of expression,
but free to go wherever the fancy of the poet took him, to the end
that the entire heavens of the tone world might in time be visited. He
expects of his readers an element of the devotee. It is not for
amateurs that he writes, still less for the votaries of fashio