The changes in technical features inaugurated by Beethoven are of far less importance, comparatively, than the increase in æsthetic content, individuality, and expression. As has been noted, he was no iconoclast; seeking new effects in a striving for mere originality or altering forms for the mere sake of trying something new. On the contrary, his innovations were always undertaken with extreme discretion and only as necessity required; and even to the last the sonata form, ‘that triune symmetry of exposition, illustration, and repetition,’ can be discerned as the basis upon which his most extensive work was built. Even when this basis is not at first clearly apparent, the details which seemed to obscure it are found, upon study, to be the organic and logical amplification of the structure itself, never mere additions. It should be pointed out, however, that the last works, especially those for the piano, are of so transcendental or mystic a nature as to make it impossible for the average listener to appreciate them to their fullest extent; indeed, they provide a severe test even for a mature interpreter and for that reason they will hardly ever become popular. VII In spite of Beethoven’s own assertion that his work is not meant to be ‘program music,’ his name will no doubt always be connected with that special phase of modern art. We have seen how distinctly he grasped the true principles of program or delineative music in his words, _Mehr Ausdruck der Empfindung als Malerei_ (the expression of feeling, not a painting); never an imitation, but a reproduction of the effect. More than any musician of his own or earlier times was he able to saturate his composition with the mood which prompted it. For this reason the whole world sees pictures in his sonatas and reads stories into his symphonies, as it has not done with the work of Haydn, Emanuel Bach, or Mozart. With the last-named composer it was sufficient to bring all the devices of art--balance, light and shade, contrast, repetition, surprise--to the perfection of an artistic ensemble, with a result which satisfies the æsthetic demands of the most fastidious. Beethoven’s achievement was art plus mood or emotion; therefore the popular habit of calling the favorite sonata in C sharp minor the ‘Moonlight Sonata,’ unscholarly though it may be, is striking witness to one of the most fundamental of Beethoven’s qualities--the power by which he imbued a given composition with a certain mood recognizable at once by imaginative minds. The aim at realism, however, is only apparent. That he is not a ‘programmist,’ in the accepted sense, is evident from the fact that he gave descriptive names to only the two symphonies, the _Eroica_ and _Pastoral_. He does not tell a story, he produces a feeling, an impression. His work is the notable embodiment of Schopenhauer’s idea: ‘Music is not a representation of the world,