Two centuries claim Beethoven for their own—two centuries which in the history of music will always appear as very opposites, close though their relations are: the eighteenth century with its worship of form, the nineteenth with its worship of the idea. In Beethoven both meet, in him both find their greatest representative—in him first, and in him alone, their leading principles become reconciled. He is the only composer in whose works the great ideas which were agitating his time, some of the problems which have occupied man's mind since the beginning of man's history, have found an echo. Not that he deliberately took as it were those ideas and problems as the text of his compositions, but so much had he thought about them, so deeply was he imbued with their importance, so much had they become keynotes of his mode of feeling, so much in fact part and parcel of his personality, that the freer the expression he allowed to the latter in his music, the more was it bound to reflect those ideas. At the same time, it was Beethoven who put the last finishing touches to the grand edifice of musical forms, the material for which had been brought together in hundreds of years of slow, persistent, and consistent work, till in Ph. E. Bach, in Haydn, and in Mozart arose the architects who with master-hands were to shape and fix its outlines for all time. Beethoven accepted the forms from them, but soon he began to alter and to extend them: again not because he deliberately wished to improve on his predecessors, but because he did not find these forms an adequate medium for the expression of his individuality. It was in obedience to the demands of the latter that the inherited forms gradually assumed a new aspect altogether, gradually gained that power and pliability which enabled them to give voice to every shade of feeling with a directness, an intensity and subtleness which they had never been thought capable of.
