The piano is the only keyboard instrument in which one can grandly vary the effects of the harmonics or overtones of a chord at will by balancing the… - Charles Rosen

In Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, act V, scene 1, we find this exchange between the two young lovers: <p>JESSICA: I am never merry when I hear sweet music
LORENZO: The reason is, your spirits are attentive<p>The opening of the finale of Beethoven' s 'Emperor' Concerto provides a splendid example of the kind of theme that is the inspiration for this book. A completely unified theme that hangs together beautifully, it nevertheless portrays vividly a series of contrasting sentiments in a succession that amounts to a small narrative ...

Beethoven is the first composer to represent the complex process of memory-not merely the sense of loss and regret that accompanies visions of the past, but the physical experience of calling up the past within the present.

Some of the Etudes in the first set, opus 10, were written by the time Chopin was twenty. It is with these pieces that Chopin's style was fully revealed in all its power and subtlety. Later works are sometimes more ambitious and, in a few cases, more audacious, but there were no radical changes of style, nothing to compare to the later revolutions we find in the careers of Haydn and Beethoven, or even in the shorter lives of Mozart and Schubert. Chopin's mastery was proven with the twelve Etudes of opus 10.