as well as formal beauty. Much of the vigor of his themes is dynamic and rhythmic. He was one of the first to realize how fully the vitality and point of musical thought depends upon these elements in design. His directions about shading and other features of expression were imperative and minute.
His harmonic method is an obvious expansion of that of the Haydn-Mozart age, peculiar chiefly in its greater freedom, especially in contrasts and shifts. Counterpoint, as a rule, he uses more incidentally than with consistent deliberation, except in certain of his later works. Even then he is very free to modify details so as to heighten emotional effect.
His instinct for instrumentation was acute. He greatly advanced the range of pianism by his perception of the piano's possibilities. He elevated music for the violin and other solo instruments by giving it more to say, and by making technique the servant of ideas. The orchestra he wielded with imperial mastery, bringing to light beauties of combination or alternation, and devices of sonority and grandeur that have never since been forgotten.
His treatment of the voice is on the whole not so sympathetic or successful. Of songs he wrote many, those of more or less dramatic quality being specially fine. His union of soloists and chorus with the orchestra in the Ninth Symphony was almost an absolute novelty, but was effected from the orchestral point of view. His distinctly choral works, such as his masses, are similarly conceived. His one opera and his one oratorio more or less illustrate the same point.
The core of Beethoven's style is instrumental, but in a very
much more advanced sense than in the case of Haydn. The
older master worked along lines of conception and execution
that still betrayed their derivation from vocal methods. With
Beethoven there comes to the front a new structural technique,
resting frankly upon principles not suggested by either the folk-song
or the choral motet. In this regard, far more than in any innovation
as to external form, lies one of the main reasons for his
epoch-making influence. While apparently adopting the established
procedures of his time, he came to regard them from a
new point of view, so that the inner texture of his greater works
was wholly modern.
Another general remark concerns the dramatic spirit that pervades much of his strongest work. Of explicit drama he wrote little, since he vainly sought for acceptable texts, but it needs no acumen to see dramatic explanations for the way in which, even in purely instrumental works, he arranges and marshals his material. Ingenious contrasts of character, intricate interplay of opposing forces, absorbing development of situation and
