We are lifted to a higher plane again by a work which in invention and construction surpasses the compositions already mentioned and still to be mentioned in the present category, and discloses the fully developed Beethoven as we know him--the Trio in E-flat, for violin, viola and violoncello, Op. 3. Its publication was announced by Artaria in February, 1797. According to Wegeler, Beethoven was commissioned by Count Appony in 1795 to write a quartet. He made two efforts, but produced first a Trio (Op. 3), and then a Quintet (Op. 4). We know better the origin of the latter work now; but Wegeler is also mistaken about the origin of the Trio; it was a Bonn product. Here the proof: At the general flight from Bonn, whether the one at the end of October or that of December 15, 1793, the Elector ordered his chaplain, Abbé Clemens Dobbeler, to accompany an English lady, the Honourable Mrs. Bowater, to Hamburg. “While there,” says William Gardiner in his “Music and Friends,” III, 142, “he was declared an emigrant and his property was seized. Luckily he placed some money in our (English) government funds, and his only alternative was to proceed to England.” Dobbeler accompanied Mrs. Bowater to Leicester. She, having lived much in Germany, had acquired a fine taste in music; and as the Abbé was a very fine performer on the violin, music was essential to fill up this irksome period (while Mrs. Bowater lived in lodgings before moving into old Dolby Hall). My company was sought with that of two of my friends to make up occasionally an instrumental quartett.... Our music consisted of the Quartetts of Haydn, Boccherini, and Wranizky. The Abbé, who never travelled without his violin, had luckily put into his fiddle-case a Trio composed by Beethoven, just before he set off, which thus, in the year 1793, found its way to Leicester. This composition, so different from anything I had ever heard, awakened in me a new sense, a new delight in the science of sounds.... When I went to town (London) I enquired for the works of this author, but could learn nothing more than that he was considered a madman and that his music was like himself. However, I had a friend in Hamburg through whom, although the war was raging at the time, I occasionally obtained some of these inestimable treasures. THE TRIO FOR STRINGS, OP. 3 What trio was this so praised by the enthusiastic Englishman? On the last page but one of Gardiner’s “Italy, her Music, Arts and People” he writes, speaking of his return down the Rhine: