as if it were an aphorism, that all of Beethoven’s compositions were lacking in internal coherency and that not infrequently they were overloaded. These things he looked upon as grave faults of composition and sought to explain them from the manner in which Beethoven went about his work, saying that he had always been in the habit of noting every musical idea that occurred to him upon a bit of paper which he threw into a corner of his room, and that after a while there was a considerable pile of the memoranda which the maid was not permitted to touch when cleaning the room. Now when Beethoven got into a mood for work he would hunt a few musical _motivi_ out of his treasure-heap which he thought might serve as principal and secondary themes for the composition in contemplation, and often his selection was not a lucky one. I (Tomaschek) did not interrupt the flow of his passionate, yet awkward speech, but briefly answered that I was unfamiliar with Beethoven’s method of composing but was inclined to think that the aberrations occasionally to be found in his compositions were to be ascribed to his individuality, and that only an unprejudiced and keen psychologist, who had had an opportunity to observe Beethoven from the beginning of his artistic development to its maturity in order gradually to familiarize himself with his views on art, could fit himself to give the musical world an explanation of the intellectual cross-relationships in Beethoven’s glorious works, a thing just as impossible to his blind enthusiasts as to his virulent opponents. Gelinek may have applied these last words to himself, and not incorrectly. This conversation took place in 1814, the day after a rehearsal of Beethoven’s Symphony in A--the Seventh! Gelinek’s pile of little bits of paper in the corner of the room, when touched by the wand of truth, resolves itself into blank music books, to which his new ideas were transferred from the original slight pencil sketches, and frequently with two or three words to indicate the kind of composition to which they were suited. Divers anecdotes are current which pretend to give the origin of some of the themes thus recorded and afterwards wrought out, but few judicious readers will attach much weight to most of them. For although conceptions can sometimes be traced directly to their exciting causes, the musical composer can seldom say more than that they occurred to him at such a time and place--and often not even that. It is certainly not improbable that Beethoven’s admirers may have questioned him upon this point, as Schindler did upon the “Pastoral” Symphony, and that he was able to satisfy them; but Handel’s “Harmonious Blacksmith” may be taken as the type of most of the current stories, which only need truth to make them interesting.