How and what did he do? First, he became master of the piano and could from childhood sit down and make marvelous improvisations. He studied all forms of music, counterpoint, harmony, and orchestration. At first he followed the old forms, as we see in the first two symphonies. In the third symphony, the _Eroica_, he changed from the minuet (a relic of the old dance suite) to the scherzo, an enlarged form of the minuet with more chance for musical expression,—the minuet grown up. In sonatas like _The Pathetique_, he used an introduction and often enlarged the coda or ending, to such an extent that it seems like an added movement, so rich was he in power in working over a theme into beautiful musical speech. Later we see him abandoning set forms and writing the _Waldstein_ Sonata in free and beautiful ways. Even the earlier sonatas like _The Moonlight_ and its sister, Opus 27, No. 2, are written so freely that they are called Fantasy Sonatas, so full of free, flowing melody has the sonata become under his hand. His work becomes so lofty and so grand, whether in humorous or in serious vein, that when we compare his compositions to those of other men, he seems like one of the loftiest mountain peaks in the world, reaching into the heavens, yet with its base firmly standing in the midst of men. A COMPOSER OF INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC Beethoven was distinctly a composer of instrumental music, although he wrote the opera _Fidelio_, also the Ninth Symphony in which he made great innovations in symphonic form and introduced the Choral. Up to this time, composers in the Classic School had paid more attention to the voice and to the soloists in the concertos than to the orchestra. Thus we see men like Mozart leaving a space toward the end of the movement in a concerto for the soloist to make up his own closing salute to his audience before the orchestra ended the piece. These cadenzas became acrobatic feats in which the players wrote the most difficult “show-off” music. Beethoven, with his love for the orchestra and his feeling that the soloist and the orchestra should make one complete unit, wrote the cadenza _himself_ and thereby made the composition one beautiful whole rather than a sandwich of the composer, soloist and composer again. Fancy all this from a man who, when he multiplied 14 × 26 had to add fourteen twenty-sixes in a column! We saw this column of figures written on a manuscript of Beethoven’s in an interesting collection, and the story goes that Beethoven tried to verify a bill that was brought to him in the midst of a morning of hard work at his composing.