Although a solitaire, Beethoven was really a man of widest, deepest sympathies. Against his own bosom he felt the heart beat of humanity, and, love-enlightened, he divined that heart, even its total meaning. The heaven-reaching heights of joy, and the black profound of woe, and every intermediate, throbbed contagious into his own breast. Therefore is he the universal man, interpreter of his own ideal world and interpreter of nations, while, on his human side, the intense Chopin is the epitome of Poland. That this universal man was not containable within the possibilities of the pianoforte, was plainly no fault of his; nevertheless, that much of the universal which informs the chief Sonatas of Beethoven, entitles them to supremacy over the greatest of the other. As the second of pianoforte composers, what giants Chopin leaves in his rear! Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Von Weber, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and behind them many of lesser stature, Hummel, Clementi, Moscheles and such; and, still further back, the great average, the ephemeral multitude. Of all their pushing of pens, little will remain when, on some distant to-morrow, the stirred pulse and the suffused eye prove the tone-poems of the Polish musician an unfading charm, an undimmed worth, an eternal beauty, in the realms of art. RICHARD STRAUSS AND THE ART OF SOUND RICHARD STRAUSS AND THE ART OF SOUND I The years now with us are prophetic of a century notable from its beginning; a century destined to achieve perhaps beyond our boldest imagining. Already is the century achieving, as, like a youthful but formidable being, it assaults that citadel of mystery wherein Truth must relinquish, one by one, her most valued and guarded possessions. To the observant, the present is a time of shaken foundations, a time of much actual overthrow, and even a time of planning that broader and deeper bases shall well sustain the super-imposed new. Amidst an upheaval of things social, political, scientific, ethical and æsthetic; an upheaval world-wide, and necessarily sourced in the sub-strata of the world of causes; Art, for instance, is unavoidably disturbed throughout its various provinces. Only the over-sanguine will assume that the better must needs rise from upheaval and overthrow. Therefore let us look but for the reasonable, for does not many a desolated province of this material world belie the theory of uninterrupted advance?