otional programme music without a
well-defined object and that dramatically emotional art which
we have every reason to believe was aimed at by Beethoven in
many of his sonatas, and which, in its logical development
and broadened out by orchestral colours and other resources,
is championed by Richard Strauss at the present day.

We have already learned that C.P.E. Bach had entirely broken
with the contrapuntal style of his father and his age in
order to gain freer utterance, and that the word "colour"
began to be used in his time in connection with music for
even one instrument. It is, perhaps, needless to say that the
vastly enlarged possibilities, both technical and tonal, of
the newly invented _forte-piano_ were largely the outcome of
this seeking for colour in music. In addition to this, the new
art of harmonic dissonances was already beginning to stretch
out in the direction of new and strange tonal combinations,
thus giving to the music written for the instrument many new
possibilities in the way of causing and depicting emotions. That
the first experiments were puerile, we know, as, for example,
Haydn's attempts, in one of his pianoforte sonatas, to suggest
the conversion of an obdurate sinner.

When we consider Mozart, it is impossible to forget the
fact that in his piano works he was first and foremost
a piano virtuoso, a child prodigy, of whom filigree work
was expected by the public for which he wrote his sonatas.
(We cannot call this orientalism, for it was more or less of
German pattern, traced from the fioriture of the Italian opera
singer.) Therefore, emotional utterance or even new or poetic
colouring was not to be expected of him.

As has been said before, it remained for Beethoven to
weld these new words and strange colours into poems, which,
notwithstanding the many barnacles hanging to them (remnants of
a past of timid adhesion to forms and fashions), are, in truth,
the first lofty and dignified musical utterances with an object
which we possess. I mean by this statement that his art was the
first to cast aside the iron fetters of what then formed the
canons of art. The latter may be described (even in reference
to modern days) as constituting the shadow of a great man. And,
although this is a digression, I may add that all students of
piano music no doubt realize the weighty shadow that Beethoven
cast over the first half of the nineteenth century, just as
Wagner is doing at the present time.