It cannot be said that the melodies and harmonies of either the Impromptus or the ‘Musical Moments’ are more inspired than those of the sonatas. Indeed, there are passages in the latter of more profound and more intense emotion than finds expression in the shorter pieces. But most of the sonatas are in ruins. Their beauties are fragmentary and isolated; whereas nearly all the Impromptus and all the ‘Musical Moments’ have a beauty and firmness of line and design as well as of content. For this reason they stand as the best of his pianoforte works; and of their kind they are unexcelled in music. They are genuinely beautiful music; they are perfectly suited to the piano, drawing upon its various qualities without showing them off; they are finished in detail, balanced and well-knit in structure. A new epoch in the art begins with them. It should be mentioned that Schubert’s waltzes and other dances bear very clearly the stamp of his great genius. They are not elaborate. Much of their beauty is in their naïve simplicity. They gain nothing by being dressed up in the gaudy raiment which Liszt chose to hang upon many of them. They should be known and played as Schubert wrote them, not as profound or as brilliant music, but as spontaneous melodies in undisguised dance rhythms. They are, in fact, dance music, full of the spirit of merry-making, not in the least elegant or sophisticated. To our knowledge there is no other music of equal merit and charm composed in this spirit expressly for the piano. Schubert is unique among the great composers in having treated dance forms and rhythms thus strictly as dances. V All the work of Weber and most of that of Schubert fall within the lifetime of Beethoven. The three great men constitute the foundation of the pianoforte music of the great German composers of the next generation. But Beethoven’s influence is largely spiritual, as Bach’s. There was nothing more to be done with the sonata after he finished, and long before his death the progress of pianoforte music had taken a new turn. It is not inconceivable that before very long Beethoven’s sonatas will be regarded as the culmination and end of a period of growth, just as the music of Bach is already regarded; that he will appear materially related only to what came before him, and to have died without musical heir. The last sonatas rested many years generally unknown. His peculiar and varied treatment of the pianoforte in them found few or no imitators. The technique of the instrument that Schumann and Chopin employed was not descended from him; rather from Weber on the one hand and from Mozart and Hummel on the other.