Between these two schools stood Ludwig von Beethoven (1770-1827), a giant on lofty heights.  Every accent of his dramatic music was embodied in his piano compositions.  Tones furnished him unmistakably a language that needed no commentary.  “In him,” says Oscar Bie, “there were no tricks of technique to be admired, no mere virtuosity to praise; but he stirred his hearers to the depths of their hearts.  Amid his storm and stress, whispering and listening, his awakening of the soul, an original naturalism of piano-playing was recognized, side by side with the naturalism of his creative art.  Rhythm was the life of his playing.”  A union of conception and technique was a high aim of Beethoven, and he prized the latter only as it fulfilled the requirements of his idealism.  “The high development of the mechanical in pianoforte playing,” he wrote to a friend, “will end in banishing all genuine emotion from music.”  His prophetic words might serve as a warning to-day.

[Illustration:  Lillian Nordica]

The past century has given us the golden age of the pianoforte.  Advanced knowledge of acoustics and improved methods of construction have made it the magnificent instrument we know in concert hall and home, and to which we now apply the more intimate name, piano.  Oscar Bie calls it the music teacher of all mankind that has become great with the growth of modern music.  As a photograph may convey to the home an excellent conception of a master painting in some distant art gallery, so the piano, in addition to the musical creations it has inspired, may present to the domestic circle intelligent reproductions of mighty choral, operatic and instrumental works.  Through its medium the broad field of musical history and literature may be surveyed in private with profit and pleasure.

Piano composers and virtuosos rapidly increase.  Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826) stood on the threshold of the fairyland of romance.  His scheme of a dialogue, in the opening adagio of his “Invitation to the Dance,” followed by an entrancing waltz and a grave concluding dialogue, betokens what he might have accomplished for the piano had he lived longer.  Franz Schubert (1797-1828) and Robert Schumann (1810-1856) were the evangelists par excellence of the new romantic school.  Schubert, closely allied in spirit to the master-builder, Beethoven, was unsurpassed in the refinement of his musical sentiment.  The melody flooding his soul beautified his piano compositions, to which only a delicate touch may do justice.  His Impromptus and Moments Musical, small impressionist pieces, in which isolated musical ideas are clothed in brief artistic forms adapted to the timbre of the instrument, may well be thought to have placed piano literature on a new basis.

The romantic temperament of Robert Schumann was nurtured on German romantic literature and music.  His impressions of nature, life and literature he imprisoned in tones.  He was a profound student of Bach, to whom he traced “the power of combination, poetry and humor in the new music.”  Infusing his own vital emotions into polyphonic forms he gave the piano far grander tone-pictures than those of Couperin.  The dreamy fervor and the glowing fire of an impassioned nature may be felt in his works, but also many times the lack of balance that belongs with the malady by which he was assailed.