Besides his symphonies, concertos and sonatas in which are light moods, dark moods, gay and sad moods, spiritual heights and depths, filling hearers with all beauty of emotion,—he wrote gay little witty things, like the German Dances, The Fury over the Loss of a Penny (which is really funny), four overtures, many English, Scotch, Irish, Welsh and Italian folk-song settings. He also wrote one oratorio called _The Mount of Olives_, two masses, one of which is the magnificent _Missa Solemnis_, one concerto for the violin that is the masterpiece of its kind, and the one grand opera _Fidelio_. Thus we have told you about the bridge to the “Romantic Movement” which will follow in the next chapter. Beethoven could have said with Robert Browning’s “Abt Vogler” Ye know why the forms are fair, ye hear how the tale is told; It is all triumphant art, but art in obedience to laws.... And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man, That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star. [Illustration: _Johann Sebastian Bach._ ] [Illustration: _George Frederick Handel._ ] [Illustration: _Franz Josef Haydn._ ] [Illustration: _Carl Maria von Weber._ ] Three Classic Composers and an Early Romantic Composer. [Illustration: _The Piano and Its Grand-parents._ _Courtesy of Morris Steinert & Sons, Company_ ] CHAPTER XXII The Pianoforte Grows Up—The Ancestry of the Pianoforte THE ANCESTRY OF THE PIANOFORTE We feel so familiar with the Pianoforte that we call it piano for short and almost forget that it is dignified by the longer name. We forget too, that Scarlatti, Rameau and Bach played not on the piano but on its ancestors, and that Byrd, Bull and Gibbon did not write their lovely dance suites for the instrument on which we play them today. The Pianoforte’s family tree has three distinct branches,—strings, sounding board and hammers. First we know the piano is a stringed instrument, although it hides its chief characteristic, not under a bushel, but behind a casing of wood. WHERE STRINGED INSTRUMENTS CAME FROM We have seen the stringed instrument developed from the bow when primitive man winged his arrow in the hunt, and heard its twang. Later desiring fuller tone, the sounding board grew, when early peoples sank bow-like instruments and reeds into a gourd which increased and reflected the sound as the metal reflector behind a light intensifies it. Strings to produce sound, must be rubbed, like the bow drawn across violin strings, plucked as the mandolin or the harp is plucked, or struck with a hammer as was the dulcimer.