The principle
on which he now conducted his life was to give his genius full play, to
obey its every mandate, to allow no obstacle to come in the way of its
fullest development. That this idea controlled him throughout life, is
apparent in many ways, but most of all in his journal. "Make once more
the sacrifice of all the petty necessities of life for the glory of thy
art. God before all," he wrote in 1818, when beginning the Mass in D.
All sorts of circumstances and influences were required to isolate him
from the world to enable him the better to do his appointed work.
Probably no other musician ever made so complete a surrender of all
impedimenta for the sake of his art as did Beethoven.
Music as an art does not conduce to renunciation, since its outward
expression always partakes more or less of the nature of a festival. The
claims of society come more insistently into the life of the musician
than in that of other art-workers, the painter or literary man, for
instance, whose work is completed in the isolation of his study.
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