Like most of his contemporaries he composed at the piano, making pencil-notes the while. But he heard it as though he were his own audience. “When I sit at the piano,” he said, “I am standing at the same time in yonder corner as a listener, and what does not appeal to me there is not written.” This was not Beethoven’s method. Such a conscious striving after effect was not consistent with absolute sincerity. The concerto was the mainspring of Hummel’s creativeness. The innumerable concertos and concert-fantasias take the first rank among Hummel’s works. They appeared also with quartet-accompaniment, and also with a second piano, or arranged for one piano. He wrote, unlike Clementi, far more concerto-pieces than sonatas. All kinds of Variations, Rondos, Capriccios, and “Amusements,” gratified his publishers. He wrote dances in the profusion characteristic of the time. The Sonata in A flat for two pianos is precisely in harmony with the age. It is only in the second half of the century that original works of this kind begin to lose vogue, while the duet confines itself to the drawing-room. The Duet attained its highest point in Schubert. [Illustration: Hummel in his later years. From a steel engraving by C. Mayer.] Hummel’s works bristle with sound-effects. We observe many full chords, as in the orchestra, when all the groups of single instruments are employed in full harmony. The treble of the instrument is for the first time properly used in the grand style, a noble contrast to the melodic, burlesque, dæmonic, firework style of Steibelt and the rest. We meet the genuine pianoforte charm of sharp chromatic successions, where a Bacchanalian tumult of colour appears to sound a rattling fire of sensuous effects. Even modulations are conceived from the side of technical effectiveness; and chromatic insertions or sudden third-passages, charming us in the vigorous voice of the piano, are of common occurrence. The various registers of the piano, the bass, the middle, and the treble, are applied to surprising effects; a note of one register suddenly thrown into the other gives a colour of its own. Passages rapidly gliding through the various registers give a glittering spectrum. Take, for example, such a development as that of the second solo conclusion in the last movement of the A minor concerto. Here, starting at the _con dolcezza_, we find the pianoforte bringing into play most of the effective methods of the concerto style. The simply-harmonised cantabile, for the solo instrument alone; the repetition of the melodic phrases by the clarinet, etc., with an arpeggio accompaniment on the pianoforte; the ornamentation of the phrase by delicate scale-passages; the closing lines of bravura for the right hand; the showy chromatic scales, accented by superimposed thirds on the first of every group of four semiquavers; the sequences of semiquavers descending chromatically; the string of shakes for both