The _Andante_, especially the last part of it, and the _Scherzo_ of the third sonata are among the most beautiful of Brahms’ compositions. What the sonatas chiefly lack is not ideas nor skill to handle them, but success in many parts in the treatment of the instrument. The scoring is often far too thin. No relaxation is offered by passages of any sensuous charm. One follows with the mind an ingenious contrapuntal working-out that sounds itself empty, or leads to hollow spaces. Except in the last movement of the second concerto, Brahms showed himself unwilling to make use of those subtle and delicate figures which succeed in giving to pianoforte music a certain warmth and blending of color. There is little or no passage work in his music. The Alberti bass which Schumann and Chopin varied and expanded, he intellectualized more and more, till it lost all semblance to the serviceable original and took on almost a polyphonic significance. There is an attendant sacrifice of delicacy for which only the nobility and strength of his ideas offer some recompense. The Ballades, opus 10, for example, tread heavily on the keyboard. The first B major section of the second, with its appoggiaturas, its widely separated outer parts now in contrary motion, now moving together, and the mysterious single long notes between them, is marred by the low, thick registration of the whole. There is a similar thickness in the second section of the last ballade; an opposite thinness in the middle section of the little intermezzo. Yet it would be hard to find more romantic music than these Ballades, anything more grim and awful than the first, more legendary in character than the second, more gloomily sad than the last. There is a touch of sun in the first melody of the second. Elsewhere we are in a gray twilight. ‘The sedge has withered from the lake And no birds sing.’ After all, a delicate warmth, a subtle grace of movement are not in place in such music. The style is fitting to the thought.