"My dear Friends,
"Herewith each of you will receive what belongs to him, and is hereby engaged, upon condition that each binds himself upon his honour to do his best to distinguish himself and to surpass the rest.
"This paper must be signed by each of those who have to co-operate in the affair in question.
"BEETHOVEN."
(Here follow the four signatures.)
If I further mention that, towards the end of this first period of his life, Beethoven made a professional tour, of but short duration, it is true, to Leipzig and Berlin; that he excited a great sensation in both these cities; and that his merits were duly appreciated, I think I may fairly conclude the first part of the life of that gigantic genius, who had thus far already marked out for himself the course which he meant to pursue, and from which he was not to be diverted, even by the storms that soon afterwards burst over the musical world. I shall therefore pause only to cast a rapid glance at the state of the art, and at the prevailing taste of that period.
In all Germany, and particularly in Vienna, music was much cultivated, and that chiefly good music (because then there was not so much bad produced as succeeding years have brought forth); for the lower classes, among whom there had previously been many attentive auditors, began to pay more and more attention to the divine art, but at the same time rarely possessed high mental cultivation, or had a just conception of the nature of music and its sublimest object, and upon the whole was still full of prejudices against every art;—when the number of composers was not yet swollen to legion, and was confined to those who were really qualified by Nature, though not always endowed with the lofty powers of genius. But all these persons meant honestly by art, which, now-a-days, is too rarely the case; and, to mean honestly by a matter to which one dedicates one's abilities, tends greatly to promote its success. The magicians of those days, Herder, Wieland, Lessing, Göthe, and many more; together with Gluck, Sebastian Bach and his sons, Mozart, Haydn, Salieri, and the aspiring Beethoven, had exercised such a beneficial influence on the nobler, the intellectual cultivation, especially of the superior classes, that art and science were reckoned by very many among the highest, the chief requisites of intellectual existence. In the German Opera, which, through Gluck and Mozart, had attained its acme, and arrived at the same degree of perfection and estimation as the Italian, truth of expression, dignity, and sublimity in every point, were far more highly prized than the mere fluency of throat, hollow pathos, and excitements of sense, studied in that of the present day. These two institutions operated powerfully on all who were susceptible of what is truly beautiful and noble. Haydn's "Creation," and Handel's Oratorios, attracted unprecedented auditories, and afforded the highest gratification, with bands of one hundred and fifty, or at most two hundred performers; whereas, in our over-refined times, from six to eight hundred, nay, even upwards of a thousand, are required by people in order to enjoy the din which this legion produces, while little or no attention is paid to the main point.[21] In short, at that time people thankfully accepted great things offered with small means, sought mind and soul in music as the highest gratification, and had no conception of that materialism which now-a-days presides over musical matters, any more than they had of the tendency of the gradual improvements in the mechanism of musical instruments and their abuse to lower taste. The dillettantism of that period remained modestly in its place, and did not offer itself for hire, as at the present day, in every province and in every country, paid sincere respect to art and artists, and arrogated to itself no position which the accomplished professional man alone should have occupied—a mal-practice now so common in many places. In a word, people really loved music without ostentation; they allowed it to operate upon them with its magic charms, no matter whether it was executed by four performers or by four hundred, and employed it in general as the surest medium for improving heart and mind, and thus giving a noble direction to the feelings. The German nation could still derive the inspiration of simple greatness, genuine sensibility, and humane feelings from its music; it still thoroughly understood the art of drawing down from the magic sphere of harmony the inexpressible and the spiritually sublime, and securing them for itself.
In and with those times, and among their noblest and best, lived Beethoven, in cheerful Vienna, where his genius found thousand-fold encouragement to exert its power, free and unfettered, and exposed to no other misrepresentations and enmity than those of envy alone.
This was a splendid era of art, such an era as may perhaps never recur; and, with special reference to Beethoven, the golden age. Under such circumstances, surrounded and beloved by persons of such delicate sentiments, he ought to have been completely happy; and he certainly would have been so but for a hardness of hearing, which, even then,—that is to say, in the latter years of this first period of his life,—began to afflict him, and was sometimes of long continuance. This complaint, which affected his temper, was subsequently aggravated into a dreadful disease, which rendered him inexpressibly miserable.