Yet, all signs to the contrary, the Viennese period remains a period of full fruition, and this because of the extraordinary genius of the men whose works have defined it. Each was highly and specially gifted and poured into forms already made ready for him a musical substance of rare and precious quality. In considering keyboard music we have to deal mostly with this substance, in fact with the musical expression of three unusual and powerful personalities. It is to be regretted that Haydn and even Mozart have been in no small measure eclipsed by Beethoven. This is especially true of their keyboard music. It may be questioned whether this be any more just for being seemingly natural. There are many reasons to account for it. The most obvious is the more violent and fiery nature of Beethoven, his explicit and unusual trials. These, wholly apart from his music, will for ever make the study and recollection of him as a man of profound interest. Haydn can urge but a few young years of hardship for the human sympathy of generations to come. Mozart’s disappointments, so sickening to the heart that puts itself in tune with him, have after all but the ring of hard luck and merit disregarded, to which the weary world lends only a passing ear. But Beethoven’s passionate nature, his self-inflicted labor of self-discipline, his desperate unhappiness and the tragic curse of his deafness, are the stuff out of which heroes are made. So his music, reflecting the man, is heroic in calibre. Even its humor is titanic. It will impress by its hugeness and its force many an ear deaf to more engaging and more subtle language. Its poignancy is unmistakable, nearly infallible in its appeal; so that Beethoven is a name with which to lay even the clod under a spell. But another reason why Mozart and Haydn lie hidden or but partly perceived in the shade of Beethoven, is more recondite, is, in fact, paradoxical. This is no other than the extreme difficulty of their music. Clara Schumann, writing in her diary of the music of Richard Wagner, which she rejected in spite of the world’s acclaim, conceived that either she or the world at large had gone mad. To one who writes of the difficulties of Haydn’s and Mozart’s sonatas a similar idea is likely to occur. At the present day they are put into the hands of babes and sucklings, in whose touch, however, there is no wisdom. Yet if ever music needed a wise hand, it is these simple pieces; and a lack of wisdom has made them trivial to the world.