But as a usual thing they are not. The program composer generally makes a fetish of his “idea,” pursues it with the enthusiasm of the literalist, and quite neglects the formal symmetry, the stylistic congruity and harmony, of his web of tones. The result is that program music is as a rule more interesting than moving; that in attempting to make pure sounds do what words, or even colors and shapes, can do better, it sacrifices the legitimate and characteristic effect of tones--the suggestion of a general state of feeling, potent by reason of its very vagueness, and transfigured by the abstract beauty of its medium. Now Beethoven was obliged in his early maturity to face and solve this problem of program music for himself. His intense individualism, his susceptibility to strong feeling, his natural interest in the characteristic, the dramatic, the definite, and the opportunity he found, in music as he received it from his forerunners, for a more detailed expressiveness than had yet been attempted, all inclined him to take the attitude of the program composer. The poetic conception of a work was so clear and distinct in his mind that he could easily assign it a descriptive title. He called his third symphony “The Eroica,” his sixth the “Pastoral,” and said that the motif of the fifth indicated “Fate Knocking at the Door.” He called one of his piano sonatas “Les Adieux, l’Absence et le Retour;” of another, that in G-major, Opus 14, he said, “It is a dialogue between husband and wife, or lover and mistress; between the entreating and the resisting principle;” he tacitly admitted that the sonatas in F-minor, Opus 57, and in D-minor, Opus 29, were illustrative of Shakespeare’s Tempest. Other works, not specifically named by him, wore very naturally titles given by others: as the “Pastoral Sonata,” the “Moonlight Sonata,” and the “Sonata Appassionata.” At the same period that he was writing these instrumental works with programmistic aspect, he wrote also his incidental music descriptive of Goethe’s “Egmont,” his overture on the subject of “Coriolanus,” and his single opera, “Fidelio.” Of interpretation he said: “Though the poet carries on his monologue, or dialogue, in a progressively marked rhythm, yet the declaimer, for the more accurate elucidation of the sense, must make cæsuras and pauses in places where the poet could not venture on any interpunctuation. To this extent, then, is this style of declaiming applicable to music, and it is only to be modified according to the number of persons cooperating in the performance of a musical composition.”