These words of Ries are confirmed by the small number of autographs of printed works in the auction catalogue of Beethoven’s posthumous papers--most of them having remained in the hands of the publishers or having been lost, destroyed or stolen. WORKS TAKEN TO VIENNA FROM BONN Another author has endeavored to supply the vacuum by deducing the chronology of Beethoven’s works from their form, matter or general character as viewed by his eyes, referring all which seem to him below the standard of the composer at any particular period to an earlier one; and a very comical chronology he makes of it. His success certainly has not been such as to induce any attempt of the kind here; and yet that he is right in the general fact is the hypothesis which the following remarks are conceived to establish as truth. Schindler--who is often very positive on the ground that what he does not know cannot be true--in introducing his chronological table of Beethoven’s works, published from 1796 to 1800, remarks: “It may be asserted with positiveness that none of the works catalogued below were composed before 1794”; upon which point the assertion is ventured that Schindler is thoroughly mistaken and that many of the works published by Beethoven during the first dozen years of his Vienna life were taken thither from Bonn. They doubtless were more or less altered, amended, improved, corrected, but nevertheless belong as compositions to those years when “Beethoven played pianoforte concertos, and Herr Neefe accompanied at Court in the theatre and in concerts.” While the other young men were trying their strength upon works for the orchestra and stage, the performance of which would necessarily give them notoriety, the Court Pianist would naturally confine himself mostly to his own instrument and to chamber music--to works whose production before a small circle in the salons of the Elector, Countess Hatzfeld and others would excite little if any public notice. But here he struck out so new, and at that time so strange a path that no small degree of praise is due to the sagacity of Count Waldstein, who comprehended his aims, felt his greatness and encouraged him to trust to and be guided by his own instincts and genius. That Beethoven also tried his powers in a wider field we know from the two cantatas, the airs in “Die schöne Schusterin” and the “Ritterballet.” Carl Haslinger in Vienna also possessed an orchestral introduction to the second act of an unnamed opera which may as well be referred to the Bonn period as to any other; and it is not by any means a wild suggestion that he had tried his strength in other concertos for pianoforte and full orchestra than that of 1784. As to the compositions for two, six or eight wind-instruments there was little if any danger of mistake in supposing them to have been written for the Elector’s “Harmonie-Musik.” But this is wandering from the point; to establish which the following remarks are in all humility submitted: