The four sonatas are all very long works. They all consist of four movements, all but the last in the conventional order of allegro, andante, minuet, and rondo. In the last the minuet follows the opening allegro. It might well have been called a scherzo. The breadth of plan suggests Beethoven. There have not been lacking critics who judged the sonatas greater than those of Beethoven. No one today would be likely to make such a misjudgment. They lack the splendid compactness, the logical balance of the sonatas of Beethoven. The treatment of the triplex form is rambling and loose. There is hardly a suggestion of organic unity in the group. But there is splendid music in them, a fine healthy vigor, an infusion of spontaneous, genuine folk-spirit. And what they possess that is almost unique in pianoforte music is a sort of narrative quality, difficult if not impossible to analyze. They suggest romantic tales of chivalry, of love and adventure. To say they are dramatic implies an organic life which they have not. They are perhaps histrionic. They suggest the illusions of the stage. Yet there is withal a free, out-of-doors spirit in them, something wholly objective and healthy. They are not the outpourings of perfervid emotions. They are not the lyrical outburst of a mood. They are like brilliant tapestries, like ancient chronicles and cycles of romantic legends. For at least two of his most famous works in another field we have been furnished tales. To be sure, there is not much to be said of the popular ‘Invitation to the Dance.’ The introduction and the end alone are program music; but they put the waltz into a frame which adds much to its charm. Here is a romanticist at work, a teller of stories in music. No composer for the pianoforte has had just his skill. The old narrative stories of Kuhnau, Bach’s lively little _Capriccio_, Beethoven’s sonata opus 81, afford no prototype. Neither do the little pieces of Couperin. What Weber gives us is something different. It is not a picture, not a representation, it is somehow the thing itself. As for the waltz, it is too well known to need comment. The technical art of which it makes use is surprisingly small. A few runs, a few skips, a few variations in the steady waltz-accompaniment, these are all. But the work has always been and always will be captivating, from the charming, delicate conversational interchange between the gallant and his selected partner, which forms the introduction, to the same polite dialogue which tells us we have come to the end.