"My feelings with respect to Beethoven's music have undergone no variation, save to become warmer. In my first half score of years of acquaintance with his works, he was repulsive to me, as well as attractive. In each of them, while I felt my mind fascinated by the prominent idea, and my enthusiasm kindled by the flashes of his genius, his unlooked-for episodes, shrill dissonances, and bold modulations gave me an unpleasant sensation. But how soon did I become reconciled to them! all that had appeared hard I soon found indispensable. The gnome-like pleasantries, which at first appeared too distorted, the stormy masses of sound which I found too chaotic, I have in after times learned to love. But while retracting my early critical exceptions, I must still maintain as my creed that eccentricities like those of Beethoven are reconcilable with his works alone, and are dangerous models to other composers, many of whom have been wrecked in their attempts at imitation." No doubt the peculiarities of Beethoven are inimitable, though as great would be as welcome in a mind of equal greatness. The natural office of such a genius is to rouse others to a use and knowledge of their own faculties; never to induce imitation of its own individuality. As an instance of the justice and undoubting clearness of such a mind, as to its own methods, take the following anecdote from Beethoven's "Pupil Ries":-- "All the initiated must be interested in the striking fact which occurred respecting one of Beethoven's last solo sonatas, (in B major, with the great fugue, Op. 106,) a sonata which has _forty-one pages of print_. Beethoven had sent it to me, to London, for sale, that it might appear there at the same time as in Germany. The engraving was completed, and I in daily expectation of the letter naming the day of publication. This arrived at last, but with this extraordinary request: 'Prefix the following two notes, as a first bar, to the beginning of the adagio.' This adagio has from nine to ten pages of print. I own the thought struck me involuntarily that all might not be right with my dear old master, a rumor to that effect having often been spread. What! add two notes to a composition already worked out and out, and completed months ago? But my astonishment was yet to be heightened by the _effect_ of these two notes. Never could such be found again--so striking--so important; no, not even if contemplated at the very beginning of the composition. I would advise every true lover of the art to play this adagio first _without_, and then with these two notes which now form the first bar, and I have no doubt he will share in my opinion."