Yet the wonder is that sonatas so written should be today full of freshness and beauty. This they undoubtedly are. Composed perfunctorily they may have been, but the spirit of music is held fast in most of them, no less appealing for being oftener in smiles than tears. And if to evoke this spirit in all her loveliness from a box of strings chance to be the ideal of some player, let him take care to bring to the sonatas of Haydn and Mozart the most precious resources of his art and he will not call in vain. I The prevalent mood in Haydn’s music is one of frank cheerfulness. His native happy disposition, his kindliness and his ever-ready, good-natured humor, won him friends on every hand. These qualities in his music recommended it to the public. For the public wanted light-hearted music. Italian melody had won the world. Haydn’s happy, almost jovial melodies and his lively, obvious rhythms spread over the world almost as soon as he began to write. From the start, however, he treated his art seriously. He was never a careless writer, though he had the benefit of little regular instruction. Clavier sonatas he had composed for his pupils were so much copied and circulated in manuscript that a piratical publisher finally decided money could be made from them. He had written quartets for strings, which were received with favor at soirées given by Porpora and men of rank. He won the approval of men like Wagenseil, Gluck, and Dittersdorf. All his work, though simple, is beautifully and clearly done. He was not, like Mozart and Beethoven, a great player on the harpsichord or piano. In this respect, and, indeed, in many others, he is a little like Schubert. Both men wrote extremely well for the keyboard. The music of both has an unusual stamp of spontaneous originality. In Haydn’s music as in Schubert’s the quality of folk-melodies and folk-rhythms is very distinct. In spite of most obvious differences in temperament and in circumstances, they speak of the same race unconsciously influenced by Slavic elements. The collection of thirty-four sonatas for pianoforte published by Peters includes, with perhaps one exception, the best of his work for that instrument alone. On looking over them one cannot but be struck by the general similarity of any one to the others. Some are more frankly gay, more boyish, than others; some tempered by seriousness. It may be added, however, that those of a later period do not seem generally more profound than those of an earlier one. The later ones are more elaborate, sometimes musically more complicated, but a single mood is on the whole common to them all.