What has already been said about Beethoven's piano sonatas applies with equal propriety to his symphonies. But something may be added, because the symphonies exhibit Beethoven's characteristics in their most imposing garb, and it is through them that he comes into his most influential relations with the great mass of music lovers. But as Beethoven's symphonies mark a transition from the classic to the romantic era, it will be more logical to consider them in a chapter including the romantic writers. Chapter XIII The Romantic Orchestral Composers Beethoven and his nine symphonies--Significance of his work--His technical alterations--His romanticism--Meaning of classicism and romanticism--The symphonic poem and the programme overture--The Liszt piano concertos--Successors of Beethoven--Berlioz and his programme symphonies--Tschaikowsky and Dvorak--The music of Johannes Brahms. The classical period in musical history is that in which composers appear to have been engaged in perfecting the form and technic of composition. The impulse which led them to make their improvements was the romantic impulse, for by romanticism in music we mean an impulse which urges the composer toward expression. Such an impulse has always been at work in music, but it was impossible for the classical composers to give it free exercise, because they had not fully established a method of composition. Beethoven found the method pretty well formulated. His material was ready to his hand. In the sonata form his predecessors had prepared for him a vehicle which they had fully proved to be capable of a clear, logical, and luminous presentation and development of beautiful musical ideas. It remained for Beethoven to prove that the symphony, the orchestral sonata, was not only the most complex, diversified, and yet organically unified of all musical forms, but that most thoroughly suited to the embodiment of great mood-pictures, outpourings of love, suffering, despair, joy, triumph. It remained for Beethoven to show how the four movements of a symphony, without any merely technical links, could be made to picture a succession of emotional states which should have a natural variety and an equally natural homogeneity. Because Beethoven's symphonies stand to-day as the highest types of absolute music, and because all of them are living music, heard in concert rooms, I quote the list with dates of production, etc., from Sir George Grove's admirable work: "Beethoven and his Nine Symphonies."