"'Wem er geneigt, dem sendet der Vater der
Menschen und Götter
Seinen Adler herab, trägt ihn zu himmlischen
Höh'n und welches
Haupt ihm gefällt um das flicht er mit
liebenden Händen den Lorbeer.'
Schiller."
In the mere grammar of musical composition the pupil required little of his master. We have Beethoven's own words to prove this, scrawled at the end of the thorough-bass exercises, afterward performed, when studying with Albrechtsberger. "Dear friends," he writes, "I have taken all this trouble, simply to be able to figure my basses correctly, and some time, perhaps, to instruct others. As to errors, I hardly needed to learn this for my own sake. From my childhood I have had so fine a musical sense, that I wrote correctly without knowing that it must be so, or could be otherwise."
Neefe's object, therefore,—as was Haydn's at a subsequent period,—was to give his pupil that mastery of musical form and of his instrument, which should enable him at once to perceive the value of a musical idea and its most appropriate treatment. The result was, that the tones of his piano-forte became to the youth a language in which his highest, deepest, subtilest musical ideas were expressed by his fingers as instantaneously and with as little thought of the mere style and manner of their expression as are the intellectual ideas of the thoroughly trained rhetorician in words.
The good effect of the course pursued by Neefe with his pupil is visible in the next published production—save a song or two—of the boy;—the
"Three Sonatas for the Piano-forte, composed and dedicated to the most Reverend Archbishop and Elector of Cologne, Maximilian Frederick, my most gracious Lord, by LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN, Aged eleven years."
We cannot resist the temptation to add the comically bombastic Dedication of these Sonatas to the Elector, which may very possibly have been written by Neefe, who loved to see himself in print.
"DEDICATION
"MOST EXALTED!
"Already in my fourth year Music began to be the principal employment of my youth. Thus early acquainted with the Lovely Muse, who tuned my soul to pure harmonies, she won my love, and, as I oft have felt, gave me hers in return. I have now completed my eleventh year; and my Muse, in the hours consecrated to her, oft whispers to me, 'Try for once, and write down the harmonies in thy soul!'—'Eleven years!' thought I,—'and how should I carry the dignity of authorship? What would men in the art say?'—My timidity had nearly conquered. But my Muse willed it:—I obeyed and wrote.
"And now dare I, Most Illustrious! venture to lay the first fruits of my youthful labors at the steps of Thy throne? And dare I hope that Thou wilt deign to cast upon them the mild, paternal glance of Thy cheering approbation? Oh, yes! for Science and Art have ever found in Thee a wise patron and a magnanimous promoter, and germinating talent its prosperity under Thy kind, paternal care.