From the time of his arrival in Vienna, his biography is one long story of his connection with this or that group of charming and fashionable people. Vienna was then in a very special sense the musical centre of Europe. There Mozart had just ended his marvellous career, and there was the home of Haydn, the most distinguished living musician. Many worthy representatives of the art of music--Salieri, Gyrowetz, Eybler, Weigl, Hummel, Woelfl, Steibelt, Ries--as well as a host of fashionable and titled people who possessed knowledge and a sincere love of music, called Vienna their home. Many people of rank and fashion were pleased to count themselves among Beethoven’s friends. ‘My art wins for me friends and esteem,’ he writes, and from these friends he received hospitality, money, and countless favors. To them, in return, he dedicated one after another of his noble works. To Count Waldstein was inscribed the pianoforte sonata in C, opus 53; to Baron von Zmeskall the quartet in F minor, opus 95; to Countess Giulia Guicciardi the _Sonata quasi una fantasia_ in C sharp minor (often called the Moonlight Sonata); the second symphony to Prince Carl Lobkowitz, and so on through the long, illustrious tale. He enjoyed the society of the polite world. ‘It is good,’ he says, ‘to be with the aristocracy, but one must be able to impress them.’ The old order of princely patronage, however, under which nearly all musicians lived up to the close of the eighteenth century, had no part nor lot in Beethoven’s career. Haydn, living until 1809, spent nearly all his life as a paid employee in the service of the prince of Esterhàzy, and even his London symphonies and the famous Austrian Hymn were composed ‘to order.’ Mozart, whose career began later and ended earlier than Haydn’s, had the hardihood to throw off his yoke of servitude to the archbishop of Salzburg; but Beethoven was never under such a yoke. He accepted no conditions as to the time or character of his compositions; and, although he received a maintenance from some of his princely friends, he was never on the footing of a paid servant. On the contrary, he mingled with nobility on a basis of perfect equality and shows no trace of humiliation or submission. He was furiously proud, and would accept nothing save on his own terms. Nine years before his death he welcomed joyfully a commission from the London Philharmonic Society to visit England and bring with him a symphony (it would have been the Ninth). Upon receiving an intimation, however, that the Philharmonic would be pleased to have something written in his earlier style, he indignantly rejected the whole proposition. For him there was no turning back and his art was too sacred to be subject to the lighter preferences of a chance patron. Though the plan to go to England was again raised shortly before his last illness (this time by the composer himself) it never came to a realization.