Come at half-past eight in the
evening with your nightcap in your pocket."
These social successes, however, did not lead to idleness. He kept up
the practise all his life of recording his musical thoughts in
sketch-books, which latter are an object lesson to those engaged in
creative work as showing the extraordinary industry of the man and his
absorption in his work. Many of these are preserved in the different
museums, those in the British Museum being a notable collection. Some of
the work of this period was afterwards utilized by being incorporated
into the work of his riper years.
Beethoven's talents as a performer were freely acknowledged by all with
whom he came in contact. When we come to the question of his creative
talent, we can only marvel at the slowness with which his powers
unfolded themselves. His opus 1 appeared in 1795, when he was
twenty-four years old. There was nothing of the prodigy about him in
composition. At twenty-four, Mozart had achieved some of his greatest
triumphs.
Beethoven's work however, shows intellectuality of the highest kind, and
this, whether in music or literature, is not produced easily or
spontaneously; it is of slow growth, the product of a ripened mind,
attained only by infinite labor and constant striving after perfection,
with the highest ideals before one.
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