The virtuosity of some of the Viennese of the period was marvellous.  Allusion has been made to the ability of the professional musicians, but the amateur performers were in many cases equally proficient.  It is related that Beethoven’s friend, Marie Bigot, played the Appassionata Sonata at sight from the manuscript for the delectation of some friends.  Madame Bigot was the wife of the librarian of Count Rasoumowsky and evidently took a prominent part in these entertainments.  Sight-reading before a critical audience is surely a difficult enough task under the most favoring conditions; how much more so from the manuscript, with its excisions and corrections and general indistinctness!  It was, however, an every-day matter especially in chamber-music.  Huemmel is reported as saying:  “In Vienna there are a hundred ladies who can play the piano better than I.”  Another musician, writing from Vienna in 1820, said:  “In every house there is a good instrument; at one, a banker’s, there are five.”

On one occasion, some one laid before Beethoven a quartet in manuscript which had just been composed.  The band essayed it, of course at sight, not one of the party having seen the manuscript before.  The cellist got out in the first movement.  Beethoven got up, and while he kept on playing his own part, sang the cellist’s part.  When this was commented on, he remarked that the bass part had to be this way if the composer understood his business.  The composer in this instance was Foerster, his old teacher.

On another occasion, Beethoven played at sight a new and difficult composition which had been brought him.  The composer told him that he (Beethoven), had played the Presto so fast that it would have been impossible to see the single notes.  “That is not necessary,” Beethoven replied.  “If you read rapidly, many misprints may occur; you do not heed them, if you only know the language.”  Wagner in his life of Beethoven says:  “The power of the musician is not to be appreciated otherwise than through the idea of magic.”  It would seem so in very fact.  Consider the million combinations of which the brain has to take cognizance while doing so comparatively simple a thing as transposing.  Not to play the particular notes which are indicated on the staff, but some others, one or two steps higher or lower; to play four or five at a stroke, as in piano, and to do it quickly, sixty or eighty or a hundred in a minute,—­this is almost like magic, but it is nothing to what Beethoven frequently did in music.  At a public concert at which he played, he asked his friend Seyfried, a distinguished composer and all-round musician, to turn the leaves for him of a new concerto written for the occasion.  “But that was easier said than done,” said Seyfried who told the story.  “I saw nothing but blank leaves with a few utterly incomprehensible Egyptian hieroglyphics which served him as guides, for he played nearly the whole of the solo part from memory, not