As for harmonic variety, his daring was such as to scandalize all the conservatives of his generation. The First Symphony opens with a passage of which Grove writes: “That a composition professing to be in the key of C should begin with a discord in the key of F, and by the third bar be in that of G, was surely startling enough to ears accustomed to the regular processes of that time.” The passage did in fact meet with strong opposition from such critics as Preindl, Abbé Stadler, and Dionys Weber. In the Second Symphony there are many foretastes of the radical harmonic methods Beethoven later developed. Returning to his Restatement section, for instance, in the first movement, the key of which is D, he reaches the very remote key of C-sharp major, which he emphasizes by a long reiteration of its tonic chord, forte, lasting six full measures. Then, with a diminuendo, a long C-sharp, in unison, is held until, by the addition of an A, we are made to feel that this C-sharp has become a leading-note in the original key of D, and so we are home again.[43] The coda of the same movement contains one of those rapid, kaleidoscopic modulations through many keys which Beethoven knows how to use so excitingly. In eleven measures we are bundled through G, B-flat, A-minor, B-flat again, C-minor, E-flat minor, F-sharp minor, and E, and after it all find ourselves quite breathless, but safely home again in D. Many similar passages of harmonic virtuosity are to be found in the Second Symphony; and they show Beethoven feeling his way toward the wonderful flexibility of his later harmonic style. In his early thirties, then, at the close of his apprenticeship or period of acquisition of resources and establishment of technique, Beethoven had in the first place thoroughly assimilated the sonata-form developed by his forerunners as the most convenient and natural medium for the expression of the free, direct, and widely eclectic secular spirit in music. He had, in the second place, raised this form to higher potencies of beauty and expressiveness, by rigorous exclusion of what was superfluous and inorganic in it, by purification of its texture and strengthening of its essential structural features, and by introduction into it, through the power of his genius for composition, of more subtle and more thoroughgoing contrasts of rhythm, harmony, and general expressive character. Still he was not content. His soaring idealism demanded a still greater flexibility of form, as well as a more intense and intimate utterance of feeling. “I am not satisfied,” he wrote in 1802, “with my works up to the present time. From to-day I mean to take a new road.” What that road was, what superstructure he proceeded to build on so solid a foundation, we must now try to determine. FOOTNOTES: [37] “Beethoven et Wagner. Essais d’Histoire et de Critique Musicales.” Teodor de Wyzewa. Paris, 1898.