Beethoven and His Forerunners

Just as success in the intellectual and moral worlds results from power to shape ideas and conduct, to make syntheses which combine the most various elements in unity, so artist...

The modern view of history is vivified by a principle scarcely dreamed of before the middle of the last century; the conception which permeates all our interpretations of the st...

The need of mastering life, of reducing its multitudinous, thronging details to some sort of order, that shall lack neither the unity which alone can satisfy the mind, nor the v...

One of the most fascinating, and at the same time, the most baffling problem of the biographer, is to determine just what proportion of the characteristics of a great man are in...

In the early eighteenth century there lived in a small village called Rohrau, situated near the Leitha River, which forms the boundary between Lower Austria and Hungary, a certa...

It has been often pointed out by historians and critics that in their early stages the arts of architecture, sculpture, and painting were the servants of religion. Nursed throug...

Although Mozart, born twenty-four years later than Haydn, and therefore belonging to another generation, was under heavy obligations to his forerunner for technical resources an...

History and analytic thought alike reveal the fact that the highest pinnacles of art can be scaled only at those happy moments when favoring conditions of two distinct kinds hap...

time went on more profound. He became morbidly suspicious, withdrew himself entirely from casual social intercourse, and distrusted even his best friends. Friendly consultations...

The third and last period of Beethoven’s life, from 1813 to 1827, during which he produced the remarkable later pianoforte sonatas and string quartets, the Quintet, opus 104, th...