are no mere juggling with tones; they are vast tonal edifices,
examples of what the imagination of man controlled by intellect
can achieve. Possibly Beethoven’s greatest skill as a musical ar-
chitect was shown in his treatment of the Coda, which became
the crowning climax of a movement, a last driving home with
all possible eloquence of the message heretofore presented. The
end of previous compositions had too often been a mere ceas-
ing to go, a running down, but in Beethoven there is usually a
strong objective point towards which everything converges.
Fully conscious as he was of the throbbing human message it was
his mission to reveal, we may be sure that Beethoven spared no
effort to enhance the expressive capabilities of music as a lan-
guage. Certain aspects of his style in this respect are strikingly
noticeable in every one of his representative works. First, the
marvellous rhythmic vitality. Note the absence of the former
sing-song rhythm of Haydn; in its stead we hear the heart-beat,
now fast, now slow, of a living human being. No longer can the
hearer in dreamy apathy beat time with his foot. Second, his
use of the fiercest dissonances to express the heights and depths
of our stormy human existence. In listening to contemporary
works nothing should persuade us more strongly to a sympa-
thetic tolerance, or at any rate to a suspension of judgment,
than the fact that many of Beethoven’s most individual cries
(surely in his case the outward expression of what he heard
within, those very outbursts which to-day ring longest in our
consciousness) were considered at the time of their creation as
the ravings of a mad-man. Dissonances, both acoustically and
psychologically, are a vital principle in music. In no respect was
his music more original than in his Promethean boldness in their
use. One of his favorite conceptions was that music should strike
fire from the soul of man; it was not meant to lull the hearer
into a drowsy revery, but to awaken his spiritual consciousness
with a shock at times positively galvanic. A third feature is his
subtlety in expression, as is shown by the minute indications in
which every page of his work abounds. The crescendos, often
leading to a sudden drop to pianissimo, the long stretches of
hushed suspense, the violent sforzandos on unimportant beats,
the plasticity of periodic formation, all these workings of a rich
imagination first gave music its place as the supreme art of hu-
man expression.
A word must be spoken concerning two forms which we owe to