contact. When we come to the question of his creative
talent, we can only marvel at the slowness with which his powers
unfolded themselves. His opus 1 appeared in 1795, when he was
twenty-four years old. There was nothing of the prodigy about him in
composition. At twenty-four, Mozart had achieved some of his greatest
triumphs.

Beethoven's work however, shows intellectuality of the highest kind, and
this, whether in music or literature, is not produced easily or
spontaneously; it is of slow growth, the product of a ripened mind,
attained only by infinite labor and constant striving after perfection,
with the highest ideals before one.

He had been trying his hand at composition for many years, but was
always up to this time known as a performer rather than as a composer,
although he frequently played his own compositions, and had as we have
seen, great talent at improvising, which in itself is a species of
composition, and an indication of musical abilities of the highest
order.

All the great masters of music delighted in the exercise of this talent,
although it is now rarely attempted in public, Chopin having been one of
the last to exercise it. Bach excelled in it, sometimes developing
themes in the form of a fugue at a public performance. No preparation
would be possible under these circumstances, as in many cases the theme
would be given by one of the audience.

This art of improvising, as these masters practised it,--who can explain
it or tell how it is done? All we know is that the brain conceives the
thought, and on the instant the fingers execute it in ready obedience to
the impulse sent out by the brain, the result being a finished
performance, not only so far as the melody is concerned, but in harmony
and counterpoint as well. Mozart, at the age of fourteen, at Mantua, on
his second Italian tour, improvised a sonata and fugue at a public
concert, taking the impressionable Italians by storm, and such
performances he repeated frequently in after years. Beethoven excelled
in this direction as greatly as he afterward did in composition,
towering high over his contemporaries. Czerny, pupil of Beethoven and
afterward teacher of Liszt, states that Beethoven's improvisations
created the greatest sensation during the first few years of his stay in
Vienna. The theme was sometimes original, sometimes given by the
auditors. In Allegro movements there would be bravura passages, often
more difficult than anything in