“Almaechtiger, im Walde ich bin selig, gluecklig im Wald.  Jeder Baum spricht durch dich!”

“O Gott!  Welche Herrlichkeit in einer solchen Waldgegend.”

In summer he usually resorted to one of the beautiful villages in the environs of Vienna, since absorbed by the city.  Thus he repaired to Heiligenstadt to write his first mass.  “Oh, the charm of the woods, who can express it!” he writes, and in many of his letters from the country, he expresses his joy at being there.  “No man on earth can love the country as I do.  Thickets, trees and rocks supply the echo man longs for.”  His best ideas came to him while walking through the fields and woods.  At such times his mind became serene and he would attain that degree of abstraction from the world which enabled him to develop his musical ideas.  He always carried note-books and would jot down a thought as it came to him.  When he got home he would elaborate it and work it into shape.  He would walk for hours in all sorts of weather.  Like Thoreau, he generally preferred to be alone in his walks, the presence of a companion preventing him from working out his thoughts.

Very properly, he occupied himself but little with the music of other composers.  To a man of his individuality, inspiration from the outer world was not to be had or desired.  His own inner wealth was sufficient.  Curiously, he set a high value on Cherubini during the period of writing Fidelio and the Third Symphony.  His own creations however, were of paramount interest to him.  He was a slow worker, continually polishing and improving his work up to the moment that it reached the engraver’s hands.

“The Andante” said Wagner “is the typical German style.”  It was not Beethoven’s best style.  Essentially a man of extremes, he delighted in swinging the pendulum to its furthest limit either way.  He early in life acquired the irrepressible joyousness in his compositions, which was Haydn’s distinguishing trait.  It is the key-note to much of Beethoven’s work up to the time of composing the Grand Mass.  It figures to some extent in his subsequent work.  It is a feature which Wagner never tires of exploiting in Beethoven’s work.  Whenever he mentions Beethoven’s name the word Heiterkeit (joyousness) is sure to follow.  The two are almost synonymous with him.  Where Beethoven is unapproachable, however, is in his slow movements, the Adagios, solemn and portentous, in which all of world-sorrow finds expression.  It is in these scenes of terror that his powers stand out with supernatural clearness.

His infinitude impresses one.  It is as if he had penetrated other spheres and could speak in new tongues.  He delighted in startling contrasts.  The Kyrie of the Mass in D has always presented itself to my consciousness as a series of gigantic tone-pictures, in which the omnipotence of God, and the impotence of humanity is brought into juxtaposition.  The Coriolanus overture is another instance among the