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Who taught me, when a happy schoolboy—in the house of my beloved and venerated master, the Rev. Alfred Whitehead, M.A., and his dear wife—to sing at sight, who first fostered my passion for music; to that genial and highly accomplished man, who has vanished from my view for years, but not from my memory, where he resides ever, as a kind of Apollo Belvedere of those far-off days—that New World to which the Columbus Man, may never return.  ...

These essays originally appeared in The Musical Standard , for which paper they were written. While admitting that the author has at times been carried away by his exuberant fancy, it is impossible to deny that he possesses in a very high degree those powers of analysis without which it is impossible to do justice to, or even approximately to understand, Beethoven. Music is verily the language of the soul—higher, finer, more delicate in its methods, and more ethereal in its results, than anythin

T HERE are some words of such indefinite pregnancy that they expand the soul when we pronounce them. The highest of these I do not name; but "love" is one, "spirit" another, "immortality" another, and "symphony" another. We suppose, the first symphony was when "the morning stars shouted together for joy;" and the mystic world-tree, Igdrasil, with its "leaves of human existence," and myriad manifestations, maketh a symphony for ever in the ear of the Eternal. As music is sound, so perhaps all sou

"Opus 21."—So, when Beethoven came of age, musically speaking, he wrote his first symphony. Ah! who can realize the feelings of a Beethoven sitting down to write his first symphony; fuller feelings probably were not, and could not, be in the world, among all the manifestations of human existence. What flush of hope! what throbs of pleasure! what high-beating plethora of imaginative blood! what almost painful fulness!—necessity to rush forth in poetic utterance, and fling all together what of lat

The worn-out despot offered a premium for a new pleasure; the critic would often do so for a new epithet. How shall I characterize this exquisite prelude? It is as the portico to the Walhalla of the gods. Here we have the real Beethoven in his divine profundity—profound, because beautiful; its very beauty constituting the depth, as it were, thickening into it, like the ocean and heaven. This beauty, the true Proteus, is evasive; its import was not clear to the utterer himself, no message of the

I often doubt, war can never cease, for its element is so great and potent in art—especially music and her twin-sister, poetry. Carlyle specially speaks of the "great stroke, too, that was in Shakespeare, had it come to that;" and, indeed, makes this—together with the "so much unexpressed in him to the last"—in short, his infinitude, the very thing which Schubert's kindred eye saw in Beethoven, differentiating him, his two chief points of admiration and test in general of a man. Besides, in our

At the moment we write, all round us we see nature emerged— "Nobler and balmier for her bath of storm." The grim tempests of early winter have passed over, and after a South-Italian night—a perfect blaze of constellations, with the Evening Star incredible in the west, large, lustrous, evanescent—and Orion sublime in the forehead of the Night over the mountain—with Jupiter passed over, Mars and Sirius not far off, and the eternal cluster of the Pleiades (those beautiful heralds) winging its fligh

When we stand before this Symphony, like Death, it "gives us pause"; it looms so great, so vast. It was no wonder that it was not comprehended at first; and this should be not a subject of regret, but gratification, to the genius. Genius implies non-comprehension at first, and all sorts of "cold obstruction"; and here it may at once be said that, on the whole, genius, like virtue, is its own reward, and perfect compensation for all drawbacks. This should be borne in mind when uncalled-for lament

This Symphony is only another proof of Beethoven's kinship with Shakespeare. The terrible romance of "Romeo and Juliet" (where the atmosphere seems loaded with love and doom); the classic grandeur of "Coriolanus" and "Julius Cæsar"; the passionate intensity of "Othello"; the fearful sublimity (depth, as well as height and breadth) of "Macbeth" and "Lear;" the beautiful greatness of the "Tempest"; and the subtlety (seraphic, not demoniac), tragic picturesqueness, inner life, and almost superhuman

Beethoven might well write an Heroic Symphony, for the very soul of his symphonies is heroism. He named one "heroic," but he wrote many, including the sonatas, which are unfortunately limited to the piano, whose powers they utterly transcend. Heroism is the soul, and antagonism the substance, through which heroism ultimately fights its way. Beethoven is the Hercules of music (Hercules was in some sort also the Pagan Christ), undertaking labours for men's emancipation and help; beating Hydros dow

"Here (in Heiligenstadt, near Vienna, in the summer of 1808, lying by the brook with nut-trees, listening to the birds singing), I wrote the 'Scene by the Brook,' and the goldhammers there up above me, the quails and cuckoos round about me, helped compose."—Beethoven to Schindler. These last words throw a light on the oft-abused passage where the birds are imitated. We should not judge a Beethoven hastily—especially not assign to his action low grounds. We here see that the passage was not intro

In this magnificent symphony, the most picturesque of all, Beethoven seemed to have taken a new lease of originality. It is specially instructive and encouraging on that account; and, amongst other evidences, makes us weigh, whether his "third manner" (whereof this may be considered the noble isthmus that joins those continents), was really progress or decay, or a dubious transition step to something higher. However, the work is reckoned among those of his second manner, and so is certainly a po

Man divides his time chiefly between love (of all sorts) and action. One of his most passionate, as well as purest, loves, is of nature. When the two blend—when at once the lover, and lover of nature, roams in nature, besouling and transfiguring her by love, then is passion at its sweetest, life at its highest. In this opening gush, or burst, of the 8th Symphony ( allegro vivace e con brio ) we seem to have such love. Here is that rapture we missed in the expressly culled Pastoral Symphony—raptu

A noble poet, on reading certain strophes in a long poem to a friend, remarked that they were experiments. The remark rather jarred, at the time, on the friend's ear, and sunk into his mind. Apropos , say what one will about the Choral Symphony, it strikes us as an experiment. The very title seems empiric. What we should understand by a choral symphony would be a symphonically grand chorus blended with a symphony; but this is rather a chorus preceded by a symphony—its opposite, too (though inten

Finally, it is such thoughts as these, consciously or unconsciously expressed, which stamp and distinguish Beethoven's music as a whole, to which we now turn. In his jubilation is the "fulness of joy"; in his sadness the core of sorrow. He has "made the passage from heaven to hell"; he has sounded the gamut of sound. In his four great symphonies, the one in D (the rushing forth and soaring up of youth, Elterlein considers it); the Eroica, the C minor, and the A major; in these four symphonies, t