In the technique of his art, Beethoven was largely self-taught. It is true that he had the privilege of some lessons with Haydn and with the famous theoretician Albrechtsberger; but he was too restive under strict surveillance, and too intolerant of hard-and-fast rules, to take kindly to their instruction, and Albrechtsberger flatly said of him: “He will never do anything according to rule; he has learnt nothing.” The truth is, Beethoven was too busy with his own problems, the problems of structure and expression, to pay the requisite attention to the intricacies of counterpoint, which he never really mastered. What he tried to do, however, he did thoroughly. All the works of his first period, of which the most important are the pianoforte sonatas up to the “Waldstein,” the first three pianoforte concertos, the String Quartets, Opus 18, and the First and Second Symphonies, show him in the 'prentice stage, learning to treat competently the sonata form and the secular style inherited from Haydn and Mozart. The First Symphony, in spite of its dignified proportions, is essentially an exercise in acquisition. The Second, which is the most important single work of the entire period, is, as Grove says, an advance rather “in dimensions and style, and in the wonderful fire and force of the treatment, than in any really new ideas, such as its author afterwards introduced.” It is in the four movements prescribed by tradition, except that a Scherzo is substituted for the minuet. Its phraseology and harmony recall the older manner. The themes of the opening Allegro are built up out of short, precise phrases, exactly balancing one another, as will be vividly realized by anyone who will compare the first theme with the corresponding subject in the Third Symphony, so much freer and more ingenious in contour. The transitions are somewhat perfunctory. The second subject appears regularly in the dominant key. The development, in comparison with that of Beethoven’s later work, is mechanical, obvious, trite. In every way he is still, in the Second Symphony, sitting at the feet of his predecessors, learning patiently, minutely, what they have to teach him. As Grove well says: “This symphony is the culminating point of the old, pre-Revolution world, the world of Haydn and Mozart; it was the farthest point to which Beethoven could go before he burst into that wonderful new region into which no man before had penetrated.”[39]