In the treatment of form in general, the sonatas exhibit a series of different experiments, which are of emotional interest. His other chamber music--the Violin Sonatas, the Trios, and all the rest, to which I now only allude--could not accomplish the suppression of form like the free, pure piano-pieces. The great Fantasia for chorus, orchestra, and piano (the latter treated in concerto fashion), which we value as an anticipation of the Ninth Symphony, was unique in its disregard of rule. Psychologically viewed, the sonata-form is much richer in content, and unravels the most wonderful mazes. Here is the history of the re-constituted sonata-form; a history which is too complicated to run in a straight line. Down to Op. 10 on the whole we stand on the classical ground of the sonata. In the three Sonatas, Op. 10, appear the first important irregularities. Both in the first and in the second Sonatas there is, in the “free” part, a quite new theme introduced, which points to a definite design; and in the third we find that wonderful D minor movement, with its utter abandonment to melancholy, which by means of a stretto[114] in the Largo raises itself absolutely out of the contemporary style. Yet all this was new only in tone; it was no more absolutely new in idea than the Grave of the Pathétique or the Variation Sonata with its Marcia Funebre, where the middle section is introduced by means of realistic drum-reverberations. [Illustration: Lyser’s Sketch of Beethoven.]