As has been said before, it remained for Beethoven to weld these new words and strange colours into poems, which, notwithstanding the many barnacles hanging to them (remnants of a past of timid adhesion to forms and fashions), are, in truth, the first lofty and dignified musical utterances with an object which we possess.  I mean by this statement that his art was the first to cast aside the iron fetters of what then formed the canons of art.  The latter may be described (even in reference to modern days) as constituting the shadow of a great man.  And, although this is a digression, I may add that all students of piano music no doubt realize the weighty shadow that Beethoven cast over the first half of the nineteenth century, just as Wagner is doing at the present time.

Our purists are unable to realize that the shadows are the least vital part of the great men who cast them.  We remember that the only wish expressed by Diogenes when Alexander came to see him was that the king should stand aside so that he could enjoy the light of the sun.

To return:  We find that Beethoven was the first exponent of our modern art.  Every revolution is bound to bring with it a reaction which seeks to consolidate and put in safe keeping, as it were, results attained by it.  Certainly Beethoven alone can hardly be said to have furthered this end; for his revolt led him into still more remote and involved trains of thought, as in his later sonatas and quartets.  Even the Ninth Symphony, hampered as it is by actual words for which declamation and a more or less well-defined form of musical speech are necessary, suffers from the same involved utterance that characterizes his last period.

Schubert, in his instrumental work, was too ardent a seeker and lover of the purely beautiful to build upon the forms of past generations, and thus his piano music, neither restrained nor supported by poetic declamation, was never held within the bounds of formalism.

It was Mendelssohn who first invested old and seemingly worn-out forms of instrumental music (especially for the pianoforte) with the new poetic license of speech, which was essentially the spirit of the age of revolution in which he lived.

In holding up Mendelssohn as a formalist against Beethoven, and at the same time presenting him as the composer directly responsible for our modern symphonic poem, there is a seeming contradiction, which, however, is more apparent than real.  While Beethoven never hesitated to overturn form (harmonic or otherwise) to suit the exigencies of his inspiration, Mendelssohn cast all his pictures into well-defined and orthodox forms.  Thus his symphonic poems, for example, the overtures to “The Lovely Melusina,” “Fingal’s Cave,” “Ruy Blas,” etc., are really overtures in form; whereas, the so-called “Moonlight” sonata of Beethoven, as well as many others, are sonatas only in name.  The emotional and problematic significance given by