After the withdrawal of Fidelio, noted in the last chapter, and with the advent of summer, Beethoven left Vienna on a visit to Count Brunswick, at his seat in Hungary.  The Count was a man of exceptional intellectual ability, who had the greatest reverence and admiration for Beethoven’s genius.  Beethoven was also on excellent terms with the Count’s sisters, and later became engaged to one of them, the Countess Therese.  It is well known that the Countess Therese exercised a powerful fascination over him, but so did many another of the gifted Vienna ladies in the course of his life.

So vast a quantity of work was accomplished by the master during this summer, that it is likely the proximity of these friends only served to stimulate his genius.  The Appassionata Sonata was worked over, the Rasoumowsky Quartets were finished, as well as the Fourth Symphony, besides lesser works, so that he could not have spent much time in social intercourse.  He was in the period of his greatest productivity; the creative instinct was strong in him and impelled him onward in his work to the exclusion of other desires.  Even friendship had to give way in great measure to the passion for creating which had become a necessity of his existence.

That the life was a tranquil and contented one may be inferred by the character of the Fourth Symphony.  Beethoven loved country life, and surrounded as he was by his friends, whose first thought was for him, he had everything to make him satisfied.  The serenity which speaks to us through the Fourth Symphony is something for which the world should ever be grateful.  Our highest happiness often comes to us through the frame of mind superinduced by external influences.  This symphony is a song of joy, ecstatic in its pure exuberance of spirits; again, it is a benediction that breathes into our minds somewhat of its own spirit of calm and content.  The storm and stress of life is forgotten; all is holiday humor.  We are in the midst of a Shakespearian comedy, with its alternations of humor and sentiment, its joyous atmosphere, its idyllic simplicity; the forest of Arden has come to us.  It was written to celebrate his engagement to the Countess Therese.  In it he is inspired by the very genius of happiness.  It is as if, having obtained his heart’s desire, he invites us to partake with him the joy that the gods have provided.

But it is only for once, as if to emphasize the fact that happiness is not the object of existence and is not even our right primarily.  He gives few instances in which the element of pain or sadness does not enter to some extent.  His works abound in psychological suggestion; they illustrate every phase of life.  The philosophic import of the Fourth Symphony is plain.  He demonstrates the rarity of pure unalloyed happiness in actual life by the few examples in his compositions in which it reigns supreme.  Joy enters incidentally into most of his works.  Often it dominates them.  He recognized