Perhaps, too, it was not just the penny; it may have been the principle!
At all times Beethoven was suspicious, and he always thought that he was being cheated. He very often was cheated, and when we remember that by this time he was stone-deaf, and that he had no sympathetic friend to whom he could confide his troubles, we shall begin to understand why he put his rage over a lost penny into his music, with all his other emotions.
The piece (op. 129) is not easy to play, for it requires a reckless self-abandonment which is only possible to those players to whom it offers no technical difficulties. Bülow’s edition of it, published by Cotta, is the best. In one of his notes the editor says, “You can see the papers fly from the table, while the furious hunt proceeds,” and he declares that the man who wrote this brilliant Rondo could have written an opera bouffe if he had tried.
Much more might be said about Beethoven’s Romanticism. I have not touched at all upon his more exalted phases of feeling, the patriotism which was so wonderfully expressed in the seventh Symphony, the philosophy of life which culminated in the Choral Symphony with its impossible “Ode to Joy,” telling in tones what Goethe tried to tell in words at the end of the second part of Faust.
My object had been to show that musical form, or perfect classicism, was the beautiful vessel which Beethoven made use of to carry his own human thoughts and emotions, and that, as Maurice Hewlett says in his book, Pan and the Young Shepherd—
“Life goes to a tune, according as a man is tuneful, hath music.”
SHEILA’S COUSIN EFFIE.
A STORY FOR GIRLS
By EVELYN EVERETT-GREEN, Author of “Greyfriars,” “Half-a-Dozen Sisters,” etc.