Beethoven’s talents as a performer were freely acknowledged by all with whom he came in 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 his published works.  Sometimes it would be in the form of variations after the manner of his Choral Fantasia, op. 80, or the last movement of the Choral Symphony.  All authorities agree as to Beethoven’s genius in improvising.  His playing was better under these circumstances than when playing a written composition, even when it was written by himself.

Once Huemmel undertook a contest with Beethoven in improvising.  After he had been playing for some time Beethoven interrupted him with the question, “When are you going to begin?” It is needless to say that Beethoven, when his turn came to play, distanced the other so entirely that there was no room for comparison.