but an immediate voice of the world.’ Unlike the artist who complained that he disliked working out of doors because Nature ‘put him out,’ Beethoven was most himself when Nature spoke through him. This is the new element in music which was to germinate so variously in the music drama, tone poems and the like of the romantic writers of the nineteenth century. In judging his operatic work, it has seemed to critics that Beethoven remained almost insensible to the requirements and limitations of a vocal style and was impatient of the restraints necessarily imposed upon all writing for the stage; with the result that his work spread out into something neither exactly dramatic nor oratorical. In spite of the obvious greatness of _Fidelio_, these charges have some validity. With his two masses, again, he went far beyond the boundaries allotted by circumstance to any ecclesiastical production and arrived at something like a ‘shapeless oratorio.’ His variations, also, so far exceed the limit of form usually maintained by this species of composition that they are scarcely to be classed with those of any other composer. For the pianoforte, solo and in connection with other instruments, there are twenty-nine sets of this species of music, besides many brilliant instances of its use in larger works, such as the slow movement in the ‘Appassionata,’ and the slow movements of the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies. Sometimes he keeps the melody unchanged, weaving a varied accompaniment above, below, or around it; again he preserves the harmonic basis and embellishes the melody itself, these being types of variation well known also to other composers. Another method, however, peculiar to himself, is to subject each part--melody, rhythm, and harmony--to an interesting change, and yet with such skill and art that the individual theme still remains clearly recognizable. ‘In no other form than that of the variation,’ remarks Dannreuther, ‘does Beethoven’s creative power appear more wonderful and its effect on the art more difficult to measure.’