To realise its influence one need only compare the easy mastery of the arabesque displayed in the simplest piano piece of to-day with the awkward and gargoyle-like figuration of Beethoven and his predecessors.

We may justly attribute this to Liszt rather than to Chopin, whose nocturne embellishments are but first cousins to those of the Englishman, John Field." Of Wagner: "His music-dramas, shorn of the fetters of the actual spoken word, emancipated from the materialism of acting, painting, and furniture, must be considered the greatest achievement in our art." Concerning Form in music, he observed: "If by the word 'form' our purists meant the most poignant expression of poetic thought in music, if they meant by this term the art of arranging musical sounds so that they constituted the most telling presentation of a musical idea, I should have nothing to say.

But as it is, the word in almost its invariable use by theorists stands for what are called 'stoutly-built periods,' 'subsidiary themes' and the like, a happy combination of which in certain prescribed keys is supposed to constitute good form.
Such a principle, inherited from the necessities and fashions of the dance, and changing from time to time, is surely not worthy of the strange worship it has received.

In their eagerness to press this great revolutionist [Beethoven] into their own ranks in the fight of narrow theory against expansion and progress, the most amusing mistakes are constantly occurring.

For example, the first movement of this sonata [the so-called "Moonlight"]--which, as we know, is a poem of profound sorrow and the most poignant resignation alternating with despair--has, by some strange torturing, been cited as being in strict sonata-form by one theorist (Harding: Novello's primer), is dubbed a free fantasy by another (Matthews), and is described as being in song-form by another: all of which is somewhat weakened by the dictum of still another theorist that the music is absolutely formless! A form of so doubtful an identity can surely lay small claim to any serious intellectual value....