When Mozart went on a journey, he wrote the prettiest love-letters to his Stanzerl. Here is a bit of one of them:—“Dear little wife! If I only had a letter from you! If I were to tell you all that I do with your dear likeness, how you would laugh! For instance, when I take it out of its case, I say ‘God greet thee, Stanzerl, God greet thee, thou rascal, shuttlecock, pointy-nose, nick-nack, bit and sup!’ And when I put it back, I let it slip in very slowly, saying, with each little push, ‘Now—now—now!’ and at the last, quickly—‘Good night, little mouse, sleep well!’” There is nothing in all Mozart’s music the least little bit like that. And why? Mozart’s music is strictly classical and anti-romantic. His character is stamped upon it, as the character of Haydn is stamped upon his music, but his circumstances, the events of his daily life, have no part in it, and whether he had been rich or poor, successful or despairing, his music would have been exactly the same. With Beethoven quite the reverse is the case. If it were possible to play the whole volume of Beethoven’s Sonates at one sitting, the last thing player or listener could complain of would be the monotony which culminates in boredom. There would be Beethoven tender, Beethoven sublime, Beethoven ferocious, Beethoven serene, and as many more Beethovens as there are adjectives in the dictionary. And this is the secret of Beethoven’s popularity. For the musician there is the perfect form, the exquisite mode of expression; for the amateur there is the man, with all the hopes and fears and aspirations which he shares with his fellow man. Beethoven wrote the most meagre of letters, but every emotion that swayed him found utterance in his music, and this it is which gives to his music the quality known as Romanticism. Many definitions have been given of the terms classical and romantic, but the clearest and cleverest definition that I have met is that given by the French writer, Monsieur Brunetière,—“Classicism makes the impersonality of a work of art one of the conditions of its perfection, while Romanticism means Individualism.” In other words, classicism confines itself to the thing done; romanticism is more interested in the doer of that thing. Beethoven’s earliest works in each branch of his art are purely classical. During their composition he was leaning on Haydn and Mozart. Life had not yet become to him a matter of absorbing interest, for he still regarded it from the standpoint of the student. The Fantasie Sonate, Op. 27, No. 2 (ignorantly called the “Moonlight Sonata”), opens to us the first page of the tone-poet’s life. It was written in 1801, when Beethoven was thirty-one.