Up to the end of the eighteenth century music has been either an adjunct of religious propaganda, or else a leisure-class plaything and decoration. The musicians are commanded to come and entertain their lords and masters, while the latter feast and dance and gossip. The musician as an artist, a lover of beauty for its own sake, exists at his own peril. For example, Mozart; at the age of six he was a child prodigy, exhibited as a curiosity before all the crowned heads of Europe; but he grew up to a life of slow starvation, and a death from tuberculosis at the age of thirty-five. The sum total of his earnings from seven hundred and sixty-nine compositions was not enough to keep his small family alive. But now comes a mighty genius, who discovers how to make music an art of power, an expression of the deepest experiences of the human soul. Beethoven was born in 1770, his mother being a cook and his father a broken-down musician drinking himself to death. Beethoven became the child slave of this drunkard; he was driven by beatings to practice the piano at the age of four, and at the age of seven had a job in a theater orchestra. I wonder, when we go to the “movies” and listen to the banging and scraping, may there be among those servants of imbecility some lad who is destined to raise the art of music to a new height, and to die in misery for his pains? Beethoven went to Vienna to earn his living as entertainer to the dilettante aristocracy of that pleasure-loving city. He was eccentric, self-absorbed, possessed by his visions, never happy except when he was composing, or out in the country where he could give free rein to his delight in nature. It was his fate to teach music to the children of the rich, and to play for grown-up rich children in their salons. They were accustomed to chatter while men of genius attempted to entertain them; but Beethoven thought his playing was of importance, and when they failed to keep silence he struck his fist upon the piano keys, and sprang up, exclaiming: “I will not play for such swine!” A terrible calamity befell him, the worst that a musician could imagine--he began to grow deaf. At the age of thirty he could no longer hear a musical note. That seemed the ruin of his life; his enemies jeered, saying that he poured out his preposterous compositions because he did not know how horrible they sounded. Also Beethoven suffered from near-sightedness, caused by smallpox in childhood. His health at times gave way entirely, and he contemplated suicide. “My art alone deterred me,” he wrote.