“Louis van Beethoven, son of the above-named tenorist, a boy of eleven years, and of most promising talents.  He plays the piano-forte with great skill and power, reads exceedingly well at sight, and, to say all in a word, plays nearly the whole of Sebastian Bach’s ’Wohltemperirtes Klavier,’ placed in his hands by Herr Neefe.  Whoever is acquainted with this collection of preludes and fugues in every key (which one can almost call the non plus ultra of music) knows well what this implies.  Herr Neefe has also, so far as his other duties allowed, given him some instruction in thorough-bass.  At present he is exercising him in composition, and for his encouragement has caused nine variations composed by him for the piano-forte upon a march[A] to be engraved at Mannheim.  This young genius certainly deserves such assistance as will enable him to travel.  He will assuredly become a second Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, should he continue as he has begun.

[Footnote A:  The variations upon a march by Dressler.]

  “’Wem er geneigt, dem sendet der Vater der
    Menschen und Goetter
  Seinen Adler herab, traegt ihn zu himmlischen
    Hoeh’n und welches
  Haupt ihm gefaellt um das flicht er mit
    liebenden Haenden den Lorbeer.’ 
  Schiller.”

In the mere grammar of musical composition the pupil required little of his master.  We have Beethoven’s own words to prove this, scrawled at the end of the thorough-bass exercises, afterward performed, when studying with Albrechtsberger.  “Dear friends,” he writes, “I have taken all this trouble, simply to be able to figure my basses correctly, and some time, perhaps, to instruct others.  As to errors, I hardly needed to learn this for my own sake.  From my childhood I have had so fine a musical sense, that I wrote correctly without knowing that it must be so, or could be otherwise.”

Neefe’s object, therefore,—­as was Haydn’s at a subsequent period,—­was to give his pupil that mastery of musical form and of his instrument, which should enable him at once to perceive the value of a musical idea and its most appropriate treatment.  The result was, that the tones of his piano-forte became to the youth a language in which his highest, deepest, subtilest musical ideas were expressed by his fingers as instantaneously and with as little thought of the mere style and manner of their expression as are the intellectual ideas of the thoroughly trained rhetorician in words.

The good effect of the course pursued by Neefe with his pupil is visible in the next published production—­save a song or two—­of the boy;—­the

“Three Sonatas for the Piano-forte, composed and dedicated to the most Reverend Archbishop and Elector of Cologne, Maximilian Frederick, my most gracious Lord, by LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN, Aged eleven years.”

We cannot resist the temptation to add the comically bombastic Dedication of these Sonatas to the Elector, which may very possibly have been written by Neefe, who loved to see himself in print.