If you have ever seen a sculptor modeling in clay you know that his great problem is to keep it from drying, because only in the moist state can it be moulded into shape. In the same way, we have seen in following the growth of music, that no matter how beautiful a style of composition is, as soon as it becomes set in form, or in other words as soon as it hardens, it changes. Let us look back to the period of the madrigal. You remember that the early madrigals were of rare beauty but later the composers became complicated and mechanical in their work and the beauty and freshness of their compositions were lost. The people who felt this, reached out for new forms of expression and we see the opera with its arias and recitatives as a result. The great innovator Monteverde, broke this spell of the old polyphonic form, which, like the sculptor’s clay, had stiffened and dried. The same thing happened after Bach brought the suite and fugue to their highest. The people again needed something new, and another form grew out of the suite, the sonata of Philip Emanuel Bach, Haydn and Mozart. The works of these men formed the Classic Period which reached its greatest height with the colossus, Beethoven. As we told you, he used the form inherited from Haydn and Mozart, but added much of a peculiar power which expressed _himself_. But again the clay hardened! Times and people changed, poetry, science and philosophy led the way to more personal and shorter forms of expression. Up to Bach’s time, music, outside of the folk-song, had not been used to express personal feeling; the art was too young and had grown up in the Church which taught the denial of self-expression. In the same way, the paintings up to the time of the 16th century did not express personal feelings and happenings, but were only allowed to be of religious subjects, for the decorating of churches and cathedrals. Beethoven, besides being the peak of the classic writers, pointed the way for the music of personal expression, not mere graceful expression as was the fashion, which was called the “Romantic School” because he was big enough to combine the sonata form of classic mould with the delicacy, humor, pathos, nobility and singing beauty for which the people of his day yearned. This led again to the crashing of the large and dried forms made perfect by Beethoven and we see him as the bridge which leads to Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schubert and Schumann and we see them expressing in shorter form every possible human mood. Beethoven was great enough to bring music to maturity so that it expressed not only forms of life, but life itself.