A new and terrific force entered music through Beethoven, new to music, old as the human race--namely, the spirit of revolt. The world is always the same. In its fundamentals, human life, within our historical retrospect, remains what it was. An art takes what it can master--and no more. Music was ready; the world was in a turmoil at just that moment, and the result was what we call “Beethoven.” Mozart was his dawn, Schumann and the other Romanticists his mysterious and beautiful twilight. He himself represents at once the spirit of revolution, that inevitable curiosity which such a period always excites, and that speculative philosophy which tries to piece the meaning of new things. The world was full of flame; battle thundered only a few miles from Vienna; the spirit of equality and fraternity was hovering in the air. Beethoven’s piercing vision compassed all this. He sounded the triumph of the soul of man--as in the great theme at the close of the Ninth Symphony; he took the simplest of common tunes and made it glorious--as at the end of the “Waldstein” Sonata; his imagination ranged at will over men struggling in death-grapple, over the gods looking down sardonically on the spectacle. He was the great protagonist of democracy, but he was also a great constructive mind. He never destroyed anything in music for which he did not have a better substitute, and there is hardly a note in his mature compositions that is not fixed in nature. This great force having spent itself, the art turns away and starts in another direction--as it must. The lyric symphony of Schubert appears. His was the most perfect song that ever asked for expression by the orchestra. With small intellectual power, with but scanty education of any sort, Schubert, by the very depth of his instinct, creates such pure beauty as to make intellectualism seem almost pedantic. He strings together melody after melody in “profuse, unmeditated art.” He was a pendant to Beethoven, and often enough in listening to Schubert’s music we catch the echo of his great contemporary. Then comes the so-called “Romantic School” of Schumann with its tender, personal qualities, its glamour, its roseate hues. Like all other romantic utterance it had a certain strangeness, a certain detachment from reality, and a certain waywardness which give it a bitter-sweet flavor of its own. Like all other romantic utterance, too, it was impatient and refused to wait the too-slow turning of the clock’s hands; it is the music of youth and of hope. Its effect on the development of the symphony was slight. It was ill at ease in the large spaces of symphonic form, for its hues were too changing, its moods too shifting, to answer the needs of the symphony. No really great symphonic composer appears between Schubert and Brahms, but during that period the rich idiom of the Romantic School had become assimilated as a part of the language of music.