In view of the circumstances, we may think it could hardly have been otherwise. Long-continued deafness had made Beethoven insensitive to the sensuous basis of music. He considered less and less the actual sound of his fabric of tones, more and more their purely intellectual and ideal relations. The pages of the final sonatas and quartets bristle with passages as distressing to hear as they are interesting to contemplate. This tendency to harshness was reinforced by his growing addiction to contrapuntal writing. His natural style was that monophonic or harmonic style initiated by the Florentine reformers and passed on to him through Haydn and Mozart. But as he meditated, ever more profoundly, he came to see its inadequacy, and constantly felt out more and more in the direction of polyphony; he endeavored to graft the fugue and the canon upon sonata-form. His early training, however, was insufficient for such a task; his limitations in counterpoint had been correctly gauged by his teacher, Albrechtsberger; and when in his maturity he attempted to write polyphonically, he became crabbed, awkward, and discordant. His instinct was right, but his skill did not support him. In choral writing, again, to which he devoted himself with increasing enthusiasm as he grew older, he was at a disadvantage. He disregarded the natural conditions of the voice; he never really mastered vocal style; and when he introduced a chorus into his last and most gigantic symphony, he attempted more than he could satisfactorily execute. The choral part of that symphony is exceedingly difficult; and the audience is made almost as uneasy by it as the chorus. The isolation in which he finally came to live, and the natural independence of his character, added their influence to those of physical and technical limitations. As he cared less for general intelligibility, and more for the logical carrying out, to their extremes, of the implications of his ideas, his music became more and more abstruse. His constantly increasing interest in intellectual subtleties, on which his great and lonely mind naturally concentrated itself, was not regulated by a sufficient perception of the sensuous qualities of his work--for he was deaf; and consequently the balance was destroyed, the great sanative touch of the actual was lost, and his music became distorted and grotesque. Some of the fugues in his later quartets and piano sonatas sound more like audible problems in chess or mathematics than like “the concord of sweet sounds.”