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.... In our modern days we too often,
Procrustes-like, make our ideas to fit the forms. We put our guest,
the poetic thought, that comes to us like a homing bird from out of
the mystery of the blue sky--we put this confiding stranger
straightway into that iron bed: the 'sonata-form'--or perhaps even the
'third-rondo form,' for we have quite an assortment; and should the
idea survive, and grow, and become too large for the bed, and if we
have grown to love it too much to cut off its feet and thus _make_ it
fit (as did that old robber of Attica), why then we run the risk of
having some wiseacre say, as is said of Chopin: 'Yes--but he is weak
in sonata-form'! ... Form should be nothing more than a synonym for
_coherence_. No idea, whether great or small, can find utterance
without form; but that form will be inherent in the idea, and there
will be as many forms as there are adequately expressed ideas in the
world."

Concerning programme-music he wrote at length. "In my opinion," he
says in one of his lectures, "the battle over what music can express