And, just when this man came, burning to write personal and emotional songs, Beethoven had forged the finished instrument for the purpose. By this time all the conceptions of rhythm and design had been agreed upon among musicians. The scales and the modes had been adopted, the sense of the tonic deeply inculcated in every hearer, the independence of all the keys had been established and their relation agreed upon. All the ordinary positions of chords had been tested, and all the normal progressions agreed upon. Composers had experimented with many forms and had worked out the capacities of each. In short, men had come to an almost complete agreement concerning the conventions of musical technique. If this had not been so, it would not yet have been time for romantic song. For, just as a poem can have no precise meaning until all matters of words and syntax have been agreed upon, so music cannot become accurately expressive while people are vague in their minds about the identity of this or that chord. In the same way freedom of form could have no meaning for people until the laws of form were wholly understood. The subtleties of emotion could not be expressed until people generally had begun to feel in music the emotions to be subdivided. The things that Schubert did with music in 1815 were hardly dreamt of twenty years before. There were occasional foreshadowings, nothing else. Mozart, always technically flawless, did not approach his full creative maturity until toward his death, when he gave evidence of becoming one of the greatest of innovators. And it is Mozart, whose music Schubert knew well and admired beyond measure, who chiefly foreshadowed romantic song before Beethoven’s great period. In the famous ‘Statue’ scenes of _Don Giovanni_ Mozart seems suddenly to have peeped into a whole new world of music--the world of primary emotional expression. The same sense of half-discovered expressive possibilities we catch in some of his later symphonies. And in his last opera, ‘The Magic Flute,’ there are songs preserving the emotional richness of the best German folk-songs. Such arias as _In diesen heil’gen Hallen_ or _Isis und Osiris_ are the last word in song before Schubert broke through the bonds of form and established the _durchkomponiertes Lied_. I